Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors – but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.
More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.
Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent – Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife – who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.
There’s not much time.
There’s even less air.
Drowning is an edge-of-your-seat thriller about a commercial jetliner that crashes into the ocean and sinks to the bottom with passengers trapped inside, and the extraordinary rescue operation to save them.
I can’t imagine anyone better qualified to write this story than T. J. Newman. Before she was a New York Times bestselling author, she worked as both a bookseller and a flight attendant – almost like her whole career was spent researching how to write the most gripping flight-based thriller. Newman’s first book, Falling, was similarly based on a disastrous flight. It became an instant international bestseller and the biggest thriller debut of 2021, and is now set to become a major motion picture with Universal Pictures.
From the very first page of Drowning, Newman throws us into a gripping survival scenario that does not let up until the very end. We are catapulted forward by her short, sharp, to-the-point writing style, with both dialogue and action sketched with punchy efficiency.
My stomach absolutely lurched when the passengers first reached beneath their seats for the plastic pouches that held their life jackets. I’m sure most of us have had a similar situation flash before our eyes while the stewardess is going through the pre-flight safety demonstration. Newman’s detailed knowledge of airplane procedures and mechanics makes this story feel alarmingly real and believable. She plunges into a widely shared, deep-seated fear, brings it to the surface, and fleshes it out to terrifying perfection.
Like all great thrillers, beneath the page-turning adrenaline is a deeper resonance that speaks to our humanity. With devastating emotional power and heart-stopping suspense, Drowning follows a family’s desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them – against impossible odds. It is from this unique vantage that Newman is able to explore questions of what it means to be alive and what truly matters when it comes down to life or death.
Though perhaps not for the faint-hearted, Drowning would make a thrilling in-flight read. It might even be absorbing enough to distract from the possibility of a sudden drop…
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