Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

ADRIFT de Peter Morse

A propulsive work of narrative nonfiction by the survivor of one of the most chilling diving tragedies in recent history. Mixing the immersive urgency of The Perfect Storm, the psychological depth of Into the Wild, and the investigative precision of Into the Raging Sea, ADRIFT brings readers into the heart of a catastrophe that unfolded 300 miles off the Colombian coast — and the haunting aftermath that reshaped every life touched by it.

ADRIFT
by Peter Morse
Pegasus, TBD 2027
(via The Martell Agency)

On what should have been a routine final dive in sight of Malpelo, a forbidding sheer barren rock of an island with a fascinating but eerie history, five divers surfaced far from their boat, swept into a fast-moving current with no emergency beacon and no hope of being seen. As darkness fell and sharks circled, Morse made a harrowing decision: to leave the group and attempt a solo swim back to the boat — a choice that would save lives, cost others, and haunt every survivor for years. Told through multiple points of view — including Hernán and Jorge, the two men who drifted for 50 hours, and the families of the deceased — this is not simply a survival story. It is a reckoning with hubris, systemic failure, institutional negligence, and the profound psychological toll of surviving when others did not.

What distinguishes ADRIFT is its dual power as both memoir and investigative reconstruction. Morse pairs his firsthand testimony with years of interviewing survivors, boat crew, families, park rangers, investigators, and local officials. The result is a layered, riveting narrative — visceral in its immediacy, cinematic in its scope, and deeply human in its emotional resonance.

What ultimately makes this project so compelling — and so commercial — is its rare combination of high-stakes survival, psychological depth, and investigative revelation. It speaks to readers of Krakauer, Junger, Grann, Larson, and Susan Casey; to viewers of true-adventure documentary series; and to anyone drawn to stories about resilience, moral ambiguity, and the hard truths about what went wrong.

Peter Morse is a marine zoologist with a PhD in animal cognition; his scenes beneath the Pacific pulse with scientific insight and poetic clarity, grounding the book in the lived reality of currents, predators, and oceanic physics. Morse has meaningful promotional partners in the marine conservation world — influencers and organizations with platforms ranging from 14K to over 550K followers.

THREAT ACTORS de Mitch Moxley et Johnny Liesman

A quarter-billion-dollar crypto heist, a violent kidnapping, a network of teenage cybercriminals, and the rise of the Gen Z Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS
by Mitch Moxley & Johnny Liesman
Random House, Fall 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Not too long ago, responsible adults worried that adolescents who spent hours playing video games like Grand Theft Auto were being indoctrinated into a world numbed to violence and misogyny. What flew under the radar were the late-night sessions on less violent multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox that primed kids for something just as unsettling. There, kids could learn to cheat, hack, and steal in online marketplaces selling “rare” usernames and game add-ons, earning an “education” that seamlessly propelled them into the higherstakes cryptocurrency world and hijacking digital wallets—sometimes in a matter of seconds. Threat Actors follows one such group of young men as they graduate from scripted phone scams into threats and beatings, and from “small” seven-figure thefts to the heist of a quarter billion dollars from an unsuspecting middle-aged investor. They are members of “the Com,” or “the Community,” a fast-growing online collective of young criminals trained at home and emerging as a brutal and organized 21st-century Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS (a term used by law enforcement and investigators to describe this growing class of cybercriminals) follows the group’s most notorious crime down every rabbit hole, revealing who the “threat actors” behind the senseless usernames are, examining how an anonymous young investigator on X helped the FBI unravel the mystery of their identities, and asking who’s really to blame for the conditions that guided them down the path to crime.

Mitch Moxley is a writer who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications. He is the co-creator, writer, and host of the podcast Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe (Audible Originals, October 2026), and author of the memoir Apologies to My Censor, about the six years he lived in China.

Johnny Liesman is a New York-based investigative journalist and producer who codeveloped and reported the Audible Originals series Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe and is producing an upcoming podcast hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow. He’s spent countless late nights in the Telegram channels of the Com—and grew up in the same online world as many of the book’s subjects.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS de Jori Lewis

From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS:
On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime
by Jori Lewis
The New Press, November 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of plants and animals, we may more deeply understand how we create home.

For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize), Lewis splits her time between Chicago, Illinois, and Senegal.

THE GIRL WITH NO NAME de Catherine Fogarty

For fans of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Catherine Fogarty investigates a decades-old cold case and uncovers the true story of a teen murdered in Los Angeles in 1969.

THE GIRL WITH NO NAME:
The Story of Jane Doe #59 and My Relentless Search for Her Killer
by Catherine Fogarty
HarperCollins Canada, September 2026

In 1969, the body of a young female murder victim was found discarded, down a rocky outcropping off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Now, fifty-seven years later, true crime writer Catherine Fogarty is determined to tell her story, drawing much-needed attention to her long-forgotten case – and potentially unmasking her killer. Set against the backdrop of a tumultuous decade, and one of the most infamous crime sprees in American history, Fogarty’s investigation re-examines the brutal death and questions the heartbreaking reality of why she remained unidentified for almost half a century.

Inspired by the passion and commitment of other true crime writers and motivated by her own fractured past, Fogarty refuses to let Reet Jurvetson be forgotten. Collaborating with cold case investigators in Los Angeles and Montreal, new clues and potential suspects emerge in the case. Despite fading memories, closed doors, dead ends, and the police’s blue wall of silence, Fogarty’s amateur sleuthing begins to uncover answers to the decades-old murder. As the investigation unfolds, startling revelations come to light from the most unlikely of sources, unravelling long-buried lies and exposing secrets (and truths) that were expected to stay buried forever.

Catherine Fogarty is the founder and president of Big Coat Media, an award-winning company that has produced series for both Canadian and American networks, including the HGTV series “Love It or List It.” She is also the writer, producer and voice of the narrative true-crime podcast Story Hunter. In 2021, Fogarty published her first non-fiction book, Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, which won the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and was shortlisted for the Speaker’s Book Award and the Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book. Indigo called it one of the best history books of the year and Publishers Weekly said it was a must-read. Originally trained as a social worker, Fogarty holds a BA in sociology/anthropology, an MA in social work, an MBA in human resource management and an MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Catherine Fogarty divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles.

THE LAST WHALE HUNTER de Justin Vibbert

A gripping work of narrative nonfiction that transports readers to the remote island of Bequia and into a battle for the soul of the Caribbean.

THE LAST WHALE HUNTER
by Justin Vibbert
Diversion Books, March 2027
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Bequia—a volcanic speck in the Lesser Antilles—finds itself in crisis. Chinese-backed infrastructure now stretches from Jamaica to Trinidad; meanwhile, U.S. developers are scrambling to counter Beijing’s influence with luxury resorts. The result: local workers, displaced by foreign labor and priced out of their homes, are migrating south down the chain of islands in search of jobs. For former fishermen and port workers Nico, Junior, Baby, and Eustace, whaling isn’t about preserving tradition: it’s about staying afloat.

The man they sail with, and the heart of this book, is Bruce Ollivierre, whose family has hunted whales for generations. In THE LAST WHALE HUNTER, we journey alongside Ollivierre and his crew of economic migrants as they battle millionaire environmentalists, crumbling ocean ecosystems, and an ancient foe five hundred times their size.

Diving deep into Bequia’s resilient past, Vibbert details the epic story of Ollivierre’s enslaved ancestors, who built a whaling industry from scratch after British landowners abandoned the island and its failing sugar plantations. Now, as new empires carve up the Caribbean, Ollivierre has just days left in the season to land a whale and bring in enough money to keep schools open and his people housed and fed. All eyes turn to the 2025 Easter Regatta, where a final, high-risk hunt unfolds in full view of locals, yachting tourists—and Louise Mitchell, the island’s most powerful anti-whaling crusader, bent on shutting Ollivierre down for good. Failure could mean death for him and his men—and the end of whaling on Bequia altogether.

Justin Vibbert is a journalist and English Instructor at the City University of New York. His embedded reporting on underworld figures inspired the Off-Broadway play Royal Oak, now in development as a limited TV series. Justin has extensive magazine connections and has already been approached by The Explorers Club to give a presentation upon publication. This project has drawn early interest from Robert Downey Jr. and Gregg Bello, as well as documentary filmmaker Sasha Kneller (National Geographic, Discovery Channel). In addition to his writing, Justin is a model who has appeared in major brand campaigns for Ralph Lauren, American Express, and Google.