Frank Schatzing · 2004 · global

Frank Schatzing's 2004 eco-thriller, nine hundred pages and a bestseller in Germany for years. A fisherman vanishes off Peru, whales start sinking boats off Vancouver Island, and a worm nobody can identify is eating the methane hydrate that holds up the Norwegian continental shelf - and when it goes, the North Sea coasts go with it.

1. 1
   Huanchaco

   14 January, and a fisherman goes out from the northern Peruvian coast in a reed boat and does not come back - the first page of the novel and the first of the events, though nobody connects it to anything for four hundred pages.

2. 2
   Tofino

   Vancouver Island, where the Inuit biologist Leon Anawak studies grey whales for a whale-watching operation - and the humpbacks and orcas start ramming boats, which is where the book stops being about the sea.

3. 3
   Trondheim

   Statoil's Tina Lund brings Sigur Johanson a worm dredged from the Norwegian continental slope that should not exist - and NTNU, SINTEF and Marintek, all real institutions, spend the middle of the novel failing to identify it.

4. 4
   The Norwegian shelf

   The methane hydrate holding the continental slope together is being eaten, and on the day it goes the slope collapses into the deep - the real Storegga slide of eight thousand years ago, run again with people living on both coasts.

5. 5
   Kiel

   The German end of the science, and the tsunami: the North Sea coasts from Norway to Spain drowned, the east of Britain from Scotland to the Thames flooded, and the survivors trying to work out what could possibly have wanted that.

6. 6
   New York

   Toxic crabs come ashore and get into the water supply, and the eastern seaboard is evacuated - and the American military take over the investigation, which the scientists regard as the second-worst thing to have happened.

7. 7
   Cape Dorset

   Anawak goes home to Nunavut, to a father he has not spoken to in twenty years - the quietest chapter in a nine-hundred-page book, and the one most readers remember afterwards.

8. 8
   The Greenland Sea

   Aboard the Independence, a converted assault ship, they take a submersible into the deep to make contact with the Yrr - and Schatzing's argument arrives: an intelligence with no reason at all to negotiate with us.