Shark

Shark by Will Self - a thrilling new novel based on incredible real events, from the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella

Shark turns upon an actual incident in the Second World War when the ship which had delivered the fissile material to the south Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima was subsequently sunk by a Japanese submarine with the loss of 900 men, including 200 killed in the largest shark attack ever recorded.

When Creep, an American resident in the 1970s at the therapeutic community in north London supervised by psychiatrist Zack Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of thrashing about in the water while under attack from sharks, Busner has to decide whether they are schizoid delusions or reflect some sort of reality. And things get complicated when Creep's father flies in to remove his son from what he regards as a perverse commune.

Shark is a must-read for anyone who enjoyed The Book of Dave and Umbrella, and will appeal to readers of Irvine Welsh's Skagboys, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Huruki Murakami's IQ84.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in South London.