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Shadow Divers
  • Published: 13 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405992770
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Michael Prichard
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

Shadow Divers

The True Adventure of Two Remarkable Men Who Solved An Incredible Second World War Mystery

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Dec 2026
EBook
13 Aug 2026
Audiobook
13 Aug 2026
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The remarkable true story of two amateur divers who discover a World War Two German U-Boat sunk 60 miles off the eastern coast of America

In 1991, sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, at the incredible depth of 230 feet underwater, two amateur divers, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, find what divers dream about: an undisturbed wreck that they soon identify as a German U-boat.

Week by week – and then year by year – these two polar-opposite figures and their team of daredevil divers seek to identify the vessel that in the meantime they call \"U-Who\"; three divers, including a father and son, die while trying to do so. No historian or government can solve the puzzle and official records agree that there couldn’t be a U-boat there.

But after increasingly perilous diving…and painstaking archival research…and gaining the trust of retired U-boat crew…these two polar-opposite divers, who move from being rivals to comrades, finally identify it as U-869 and work out what on earth it’s doing there.

Then they trace the families of the men who died on U-869, whose bones they’d agreed they wouldn’t touch, in an ending worthy of Steven Spielberg.

It’s a story of – among other things – persistence, ingenuity and a shared obsession…
  • Published: 13 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405992770
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Michael Prichard
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

About the author

Robert Kurson

Robert Kurson earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Harvard Law School. His award-winning stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Esquire, where he was a contributing editor. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers, the 2005 American Booksellers Association’s nonfiction Book Sense Book of the Year; Crashing Through, based on Kurson’s 2006 National Magazine Award–winning profile in Esquire of the blind speed skier, CIA analyst, and entrepreneur Mike May; and Pirate Hunters. He lives in Chicago.
portrait photo of Robert Kurson

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Praise for Shadow Divers

The narrative is so well paced and constructed that it develops a hypnotic, almost suffocating tension … But it is far more than mere adventure; this is also a haunting, painful story of obsession and its attendant costs. For once, the comparisons with The Perfect Storm are not out of place; this is a memorable story, beautifully told.

Neil Hanson, Sunday Times

This book is a work of art. A diver (whose life principles we can all learn from) and a ship captain find the wreck of an unknown German U-Boat in 1991…on the coast of New Jersey. That’s a thing? Apparently. And they spend the next five years diving the wreck 230+ feet underwater until they identify it. This book is narrative nonfiction writing at its finest. Please read.

Ryan Holiday

An engrossing saga of the suspenseful, intriguing, and dangerous underwater investigation of a Mystery U-boat.

Clive Cussler

A gripping account of real-life adventurers and a real-life mystery. In addition to being compellingly readable on every page, the book offers a unique window on the deep, almost reckless nature of the human quest to know.

Scott Turow

A tremendously suspenseful story of discovery that comes as close as any book could to providing the reader with approximate sensations of deep sea diving and of life on a submarine at war, and that leaves us with a hell of an impression of the grit, guts, and compassion of a U-boat crew and the two American divers who risked everything to solve the mystery of their last mission.

John McCain

A winning tale exceedingly well told, Shadow Divers takes us on a dangerous and seemingly quixotic descent into the murk–and then, in a fog of nitrogen narcosis, brings us back to the surface with a richer, fuller fathoming of a history we only thought we knew.

Hampton Sides

A pulse-quickening real-life thriller … written with great you-are-there intensity and dynamic verve.

New York Times

Shadow Divers is not only a gripping adventure story, but a tale of dogged persistence and growing friendship. Mr. Kurson vividly captures the hazardous world of diving and the competition and camaraderie of the divers themselves.

Wall Street Journal

An extraordinary, page-turning tale of undersea adventure, in which the relentless quest to explore and identify a sunken U-boat is not just about the technicalities of diving but about what drives us on and where the boundaries lie.

David Gibbins, author of A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks