The release date for the English version of 'Shadow Divers' by
Robert Kurson is Jan 2004. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
This real narrative of thrilling adventure, reminiscent of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, follows two weekend scuba divers who risk everything to unravel a significant historical mystery and create history of their own.
Richie Kohler and John Chatterton saw deep wreck diving as more than just a sport. They pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, coming dangerously close to death many times in the rusted hulks of sunken ships as they tested themselves against hazardous currents, braved depths that produced hallucinations, and navigated through wrecks as dangerous as a minefield.
But in the fall of 1991, sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, in the frigid Atlantic waters, 230 feet below the surface, lay a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones, all buried under decades of accumulated sediment. Even these fearless divers were unprepared for what they discovered.
Both the submarine and the few objects that were recovered from the water showed no signs of identification. The authorities, experts, or historians could not identify the U-boat that the guys had discovered. Indeed, every official document concurred that a submerged U-boat with crew could not have been at that place.
An elite group of divers set out to unravel the riddle over the course of the next six years. A few would not survive to see its conclusion. Initially fierce opponents, Chatterton and Kohler would eventually develop a close bond that eventually turned into an almost supernatural feeling of fraternity with both the drowning U-boat crew and their nation's adversaries. The men's dives became increasingly risky as their marriages broke down due to a mutual fascination, and they each recognized they were seeking for more than just the names of a lost U-boat and its unidentified crew.
The story of this adventure by author Robert Kurson is both exciting and emotionally nuanced, and it is presented with a clear sense of what divers really go through as they encounter the perils of the ocean's underbelly. Though the Shadow Divers' tale sometimes seems too fantastical to be real, it all took place in the deep blue water, two hundred and thirty feet below the surface.