Sea state A memoir

After a long-term relationship crumbles and the computer holding her manuscript is stolen, Londoner Lasley attempts to start over, embarking on an effort to interview men who work on North Sea oil rigs during their on-shore leaves. Shortly after arriving in Aberdeen, Scotland, she begins an affair with her first interviewee, a married man who is as fixated on the rhythm of his work--long, isolated stints at sea followed by intense leaves filled with hard drinking and attempts at decompression--as Laskey is on him. Laskey's prose is dizzying in its descriptions of obsession, brutal work, and loneliness. The oil workers lives are hard and unforgiving, and Lasky taps into their exhaustion as she becomes their mirror image: while her lover is at sea her life is suspended, and she craves the intensity of each of his returns. "What's this book going to be, then? A thriller?" asks interviewee 103. "More of a mystery. I wanted to see what the men were like with no women around." He astutely points out the flaw in her premise: "But you were around."

In this breathtaking debut, Lasley, a former journalist, interrogates class, love, and politics as she chronicles the months she spent interviewing offshore oil riggers in Aberdeen, Scotland. When asked by her former editor why she was interested in writing about oil rigs, Lasley replied, "I want to see what men are like with no women around." In the year leading up to Britain's exit from the European Union, Lasley--spurred by a bad breakup and a home robbery leading to the theft of her laptop and the book she'd been writing on it--quit her job at a London magazine and moved to Aberdeen to embark on her investigation. For six months, she conducted interviews with 103 oil riggers, mostly in bars, but her dalliance with her first interview subject, a married man named Caden, sent her original plan to hear out an industry of men who "felt like no one was listening" into a tailspin. Rendered in irresistible prose, her whirlwind affair becomes a humanizing subplot and an arresting character study of the prototypical oil rigger, one who compartmentalizes home and work, wife and mistress, lavish spending and crushing isolation. The result is a compassionate portrayal of what it takes to survive an inhospitable corner of the world. Agent: Tracy Bohan, the Wylie Agency. (Dec.)

An English ex-journalist's account of how sex and class intertwined in an interview project that plunged her into the hostile world of the offshore oil industry. When Lasley traveled to Aberdeen from London, she had one goal: to write about life on oil rigs and "see what men [were] like with no women around." Her motivations were complex. She lost a book she was writing on oil rigs when her laptop was stolen from an apartment she shared with an abusive man she had tried to leave two times before. Her first interview subject was Caden, a married offshore oil rigger Lasley met as soon as she arrived. The attraction was immediate and powerful, and the two began an affair as the author started her research. The process of oil extraction, writes Lasley, involves a "pitched battle among human ingenuity, inhospitable terrain and highly combustible materials. The dangers are compounded by the locations' remoteness." Disasters, such as the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea in 1988, left many men traumatized. Yet working-class men continued to seek work on oil rigs because the onshore heavy-industry jobs on which they could count had all but disappeared. As Lasley discovered in her brief affair with Caden, offshore work culture created "antifemale paranoia" toward "women who 'trapped' them with pregnancy, spirited children away over borders…[and] pauperized them in divorce settlements." Unlike the middle-class and educated author, other women on shore did not have the independent means to start their lives anew. Onshore jobs were as scarce for them as they were for men, and few women were willing to work on the rigs. In poetically hard-edged prose, Lasley explores offshore rigging culture and the anti--workers' rights culture that created it. She also shows how the hypermuscular capitalism in which it is entrenched deforms, and often destroys, relationships. A raw, bold, unsparing memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.