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  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529959123
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

The Drowned Places

Diving in Search of Atlantis





From Ancient Greece to Port Royal, Damian Le Bas embarks on a cultural exploration of diving, investigating sunken human ruins around the world and the marine life that thrives there now

Immersed in history and myth, Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the world

Thousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibraltar went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves – or so legend tells.

As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the lost city of Atlantis. Even as an adult, he dreams about diving amid its ancient ruins, observing with his own eyes the remnants of an era that still reverberates in our own.

After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can’t help but go in.

Under the waves he enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this dangerous sport, diving with seals in the Farne Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both manmade and natural.

Atlantis – from its first account by Plato, to the explorers who searched in vain and the discovery that might finally solve its mystery – takes on a new shape in Damian’s quest. At once a spellbinding love letter to diving, The Drowned Places is also a profound examination of the power that myth has over us, and what happens when it crosses over into reality.

  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529959123
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Damian Le Bas

Damian Le Bas was born in 1985 into a long line of Gypsies and Travellers. He was raised within a network of relations who taught him how to ride and drive ponies, tractors and trucks, sing melancholy cowboy ballads and speak the thousand-year-old Romani tongue. He was awarded scholarships to study at Christ’s Hospital and the University of Oxford. Between 2011 and 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times, Britain’s only national magazine for Gypsies and Travellers. The Stopping Places is his first book.

Damian lives and works mostly in Kent, with his wife (the actor Candis Nergaard); and Sussex, where he grew up and where his nan – who taught him the old Romany Travellers’ little-known routes and ways – both still live.

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