‘Puts some of the balls back into serious English fiction’ GILES COREN, THE TIMES ‘Whisky-soaked, guttural, stinking and funny' EVIE WYLD, OBSERVER ‘Thrilling, brutal, poetic, literary and irresistible, one of the 21st century’s first great 20th-century American novels' LOUISA YOUNG Before there was Jaws, there was… QUINT You already know the end of his story: now find out where it all began. Quint: the taciturn and grizzled sea captain who survived the shark-ridden sinking of the USS Indianapolis, only to meet his maker in the maw of a Great White at the end of JAWS. So much more than a fisherman – a survivor, a fighter, a man who has left three wives in his wake.

In this vivid and utterly compelling masterpiece, Robert Lautner reimagines the life of a truly iconic character. ‘Excellent… a profound portrait of a life dislocated by war and violence’ THE TIMES, Best Summer Reads ‘If Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was doused in whiskey and strained through the gills of a tiger shark, it would not sound dissimilar… one of this year’s literary miracles' IRISH INDEPENDENT