It's a steamy, sultry day of a hot Mediterranean summer. Terence, a rich London lawyer, his beautiful wife Cathy, a doctor, and their young daughter Lucy are relaxing on the yacht that is Terence's pride and joy. Suddenly, a storm whips up from nowhere and Terence battles into the night to save the lives of his family. Battered and bruised, they limp into Dubrovnik harbour. Unable to go ashore until daybreak, Cathy tends to her daughter's injuries when a large motor-cruiser pulls up alongside the yacht. Its wounded skipper, the enigmatic Kurt, comes aboard the family's yacht also seeking medical help. As the darkest hours slowly tick by, Terence and Cathy have to listen to Kurt's disturbing story. At sunrise, Terence is a changed man, desperate to cling to his wife and daughter, and accordingly willing to change his life - a life about which, it transpires, he has been somewhat less than candid.

'I was gripped and enthralled' William Boyd 'The plot is tight and exciting, and the writing has great authority ... I enjoyed reading it enormously' Sara Maitland 'Congratulations ... brilliant plot, excellent characters' David Reynolds 'I think it's remarkable ... a genuinely compelling, almost hypnotic story' Richard Holmes

Yves Bonavero was born and educated in Paris. He first worked as a basketball coach with a women's team (who never won a match), then as a goat farmer in Perigord (kept losing his goats), a door-to-door insurance salesman, a magazine publisher, a 'barker' on the floor of the Paris Sugar Futures Market and an air controller in the French air force. In his early twenties, Yves moved to London where he spent fourteen years in the City, where he rose to lead a major financial conglomerate. He left the City at the age of thirty-seven to get acquainted with his family and pursue his interest in languages, literature, philosophy and cinema, going on to found Bonaparte Films. In 1996 Yves went to Oxford to read Philosophy and German, and graduated with a First Class degree in 1999. Encouraged by his Oxford literature tutors, he began to write psychological thrillers. Something in the Sea is his first book. He lives in London.