The white below

Four men will die off a Cornish harbour this summer. She will not eat any of them.

She is five and a half metres of white shark, thirty years old, with a rusted hook in her jaw and a satellite tag on her fin that has been talking to an empty sky for eleven years. She has crossed the Atlantic eleven times. Nobody has ever been at the other end of it.

This summer the water is four degrees too warm. On the north coast of Cornwall a young man with a mortgage has spent four seasons throwing fish to the seals so his tourists get their photographs, and forty animals on a granite headland have become two hundred and thirty.

She follows the fat inshore. She stays.

THE WHITE BELOW is a great white shark thriller told almost entirely from inside the animal: one summer in the head of a creature with no plan, no malice and no concept of a person. A swimmer in a black wetsuit at twenty past five in the morning. A diver on a whale carcass in fifty-five metres. A shark control programme that kills thirty-nine sharks and not one of the right ones. A barrier net dropped across a harbour mouth by men who are certain she is on the other side of it.

She is not hunting anybody. She never was. She kills three men in a single season and does not eat one mouthful of any of them — because there is more usable energy in a seal pup than in the whole of a human being, and that, not mercy, is the only reason any of us have ever survived swimming in the sea.

Every person in the chain that finally kills her is doing something entirely reasonable. That is the whole of the horror.

A slow-burn literary suspense novel about the sea, a Cornish town in a bad summer, and the animal we invented in order to be afraid of something.

📖 359 pages