Bloom

The water at Hellia Voe is the wrong colour, and it is moving the wrong way.

Marine biologist Marnie Halcrow has spent nineteen years reading the sea. On a grey October morning at her tiny Shetland research station, she finds a slick of rust-green algae creeping up the voe against the incoming tide. It is not drifting. It is steering.

Within days the bloom is following the lights on her pier, tracking the hum of the subsea cables, and answering signals she never sent. Salmon farms are dying in their pens. A fisherman is missing. The oil terminal at Sullom Voe is beginning to see what the island's wildlife already knows. And the people with the power to act would rather it was all kept quiet.

With a failing station, a boatman who has seen too much, and a storm closing in from the north-west, Marnie has to prove what no one wants to believe before it reaches the open sea: the bloom is not just alive. It is learning.

Perfect for readers of Michael Crichton, Andy Weir and Annihilation, BLOOM is a claustrophobic, slow-tightening eco-thriller about what happens when nature starts to answer back.