About the Author

Mark Cowan is a journalist with over two decades’ experience in newspapers and television. He spent twelve years as a crime correspondent for tabloid, broadsheet and Sunday titles in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and was embedded with the British Army in war-torn Kosovo. He has worked on crime documentaries for the BBC and ITV, and is an experienced technical, cave and rebreather diver. To bring Robson’s dramatic story to the page, Cowan draws on hundreds of documents and dozens of interviews collected over five years of reporting, combined with unprecedented access to the people at the heart of this true life or death thriller. He lives in Chicago.

Deep underwater lurks a mysterious illness. It has gone by many names over the years – Satan’s disease, diver’s palsy, the chokes. Today, medics call it decompression sickness. You know it as the bends.

That’s the devil British diver Martin Robson faced when in the winter of 2012, he led an expedition to the mountainous borderlands of southern Russia in search of a submerged cave system never seen by the human eye. On the final day of the expedition, Robson dived deeper into the lake than anyone before, and as he returned from the bottom disaster struck: just 75 feet down, he was paralysed

Between the Devil and the Deep is the first book to tell the terrifying true story of what it feels like to get the bends as writer Mark Cowan takes you on into the body and mind of a man who suffered the unthinkable. The book also delves into the grimly fascinating history of decompression sickness and the stories of the forgotten divers who pushed the limits of physical endurance to help find a solution.

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