New York Times Bestseller

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect
Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk
everything to solve a great historical mystery-and make history themselves.

For
John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing
themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory
effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves
to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting
hulks of sunken ships.
But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers
were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic
waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: 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.
No identifying marks were visible on
the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert,
or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official
records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that
location.

Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to
solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler,
at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost
mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors-former
enemies of their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared
obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more
than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.

Author Robert Kurson’s
account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written
with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers
of the ocean’s underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to
be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.