Bringing a unique perspective and a singular voice to contemporary fiction, this collection features lush, poignant stories about the natural world. Here are characters--mammals, historical figures, everyday people--who discover the liberating properties of memory, rebellion, and knowledge in the face of captivity and loneliness.

Whitty paints a mesmerizing, scientifically rich portrait of teeming coral reefs off Rangiroa in French Polynesia--the underwater equivalent of an African big game safari--where hammerhead sharks rule a cascading chain of extraordinary underwater creatures.

At the center of Deep Blue Home a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current and of the creatures dependent on it is Whitty s description of the three-dimensional ocean river, far more powerful than the Nile or the Amazon, encircling the globe. It s a watery force connected to the earth s climate control and so to the eventual fate of the human race.

Whitty s thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of extremophile...