One Breath: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits

With unparalleled access and masterfully crafted prose,One Breathtraces Nick’s painful, triumphant, and ultimately tragic tales, while also tacking present-day efforts of top divers to keep challenging records despite mounting risks.

Competitive freediving - diving as deep as possible on a single breath - tests the limits of human ability in one of the most hostile environments on earth. The sport’s top athletes regularly swim hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface, reaching such depths that their organs compress, light disappears, and one mistake could kill them.

Even among freedivers, few have ever gone as deep as Nicholas Mevoli. As a child he used diving as a way of escaping a frequently lonely existence. When he discovered competitive freediving, Nick was a prodigy - within a year he was shattering records. More than that, with his good looks and burning intensity, he became a star. So when Nick arrived at Vertical Blue, the world’s premier freediving competition, in 2013 he was widely expected to continue his incredible success. Instead, that fateful competition turned out to be his last, and suddenly the very future of freediving was called into question.

With unparalleled access and masterfully crafted prose, One Breath traces Nick’s painful, triumphant, and ultimately tragic tales, while also tacking present-day efforts of top divers to keep challenging records despite mounting risks. The result is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a work that speaks powerfully to the human impulse to keep pushing limits, whatever the cost.

‘A powerful story about a dangerous, beautiful sport and an unforgettable young man.’ Elizabeth Gilbert

‘With echoes of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild … A mesmerizing and haunting tale by a very fine writer.’ Neal Bascomb, author of The Perfect Mile