The Bends at Broome
A Novel of the Pearling Fleet

About this book:

The red dust of Broome coats everything—boots, hats, the lungs of men who walk the ocean floor in brass helmets and lead boots. It is 1912, and the pearling luggers of Roebuck Bay are floating again on a tide that cares nothing for the White Australia Policy, the indenture papers in a master's ledger, or the fragile bodies sealed inside canvas suits. Kenji Sato, twenty-three and far from Wakayama, knows the weight on his shoulders: one hundred fifty pounds of copper and lead, a rubber hose as thin as a lifeline, and the cold mathematics of pressure that turn nitrogen into poison in a diver's blood.

Below the surface, the world is green silence and mother-of-pearl. Above, the town is split in two—Chinatown's incense and gambling dens against the verandas of pearling masters who sign exemption certificates with one hand and calculate lay deductions with the other. The Japanese divers are indispensable and expendable, their spines already bent by the bends, their wages docked for patched suits. When the pump stops turning, when a man rises too fast from twenty fathoms, the sea reaches up and snaps his spine to keep him. No one understands why. The doctors blame cold water and bad blood; the old divers say the ocean collects its due.

*The Bends at Broome* descends into a forgotten frontier where fortune glints inside a shell and death waits in the decompression chamber. With the precision of a dive log and the sweep of an epic, it charts a season on the *Emu*—the strike of the bends, the whisper of sharks, the strike of men pushed too far. This is historical fiction that breathes compressed air: visceral, unflinching, and luminous as the shell men die to bring up.