On a hot and sticky magazine assignment for Outside magazine to cover a diving championship in Greece, James Nestor discovered free diving. He was fascinated by the ease with which the divers descended, without breathing equipment, for hundreds of feet below the water, for minutes after they should have died from lack of oxygen. The free divers were Nestor's way in to the world of deep-sea pioneers, underwater athletes, scientists, spear fishermen, billionaires and ordinary men and women who are poised on the brink of some amazing discoveries about the ocean. They have gone further (and deeper) than anyone else into the mysteries of the seas, finding the amazing plants and animals that live under our oceans (including many species unknown to science, like the Dumbo octopus, named for its resemblance to the Disney character), that humans can become almost amphibious under deep-water conditions and about the origins of life. Soon he was swimming with sharks, fixing tracking equipment to a sperm whale's head, learning about James Cameron and Richard Branson's race to plumb the lowest point of the ocean and visiting Aquarius, a Florida Laboratory 60ft underwater, where US scientists have discovered a kind of 'telepathy' between deep-water corals. Blending popular science and adventure in the vein of Born to Run or 13 Things that Don't Make Sense, Deep will take you, chapter by chapter, from the surface to the lowest depths of an environment which covers 70% of the earth's surface, but which most of us only splash in the shallows of.