PublishersWeekly.com - Review date: March 7, 2011

In MacManus's compelling debut, marine biologist Leo Kemp is fired from Coldharbor Institute for proselytizing his personal beliefs about the scientific establishment. Leo's long-suffering wife, Margot, continues to blame Leo for the death of their son, Julian, and to worry about her husband's rocky career. Despite being fired, Leo takes his class on an excursion to Monomoy Island, but encounters a ferocious storm and is thrown overboard. A multifaceted view of Leo emerges in the weeks that follow, with him at sea in a dream-like state and everyone else assuming he's dead. This lyrical tale is infused with the sea and its legends ("You ask those fishermen, and they'll tell you there are mermaids out there") and toys with the human need to make sense of the senseless. When Leo walks out of the sea, weeks after his own funeral, but remains doggedly silent about what he's endured, two things become clear: something profound has occurred, and Leo's wife has had enough of this laconic seafaring man. MacManus wonderfully captures our fascination with the underwater world, our awe in the face of discovery, and man's unknowable nature. (May)

Review by Publisher’s Weekly

Review date: April 1, 2011

Although his candid criticism of big science, and blunt opposition to its influence on campus, have cost him his position as a professor at the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies on Cape Cod, Leo Kemp nevertheless decides to take a small group of students on one last field trip out into the Atlantic. Laden with expensive recording equipment, the institute's chartered tugboat is in pursuit of the harbor seals that have been Kemp's personal and professional passion when a sudden squall washes him overboard. After extensive rescue missions fail to recover his body, Kemp is declared dead and his wife prepares to move back to her native Scotland with their teenage daughter. Until bizarre rumors rumble through the cape's fishing and tourist communities, claiming sightings of a strange, bearded creature swimming with a pod of seals among the cape's remote barrier islands. Blending mystical fantasy with contemporary science, MacManus weaves an otherworldly tale of one man's frenzied search for identity and fantastic quest for survival.

Review by Carol Haggas, The Booklist

TheBookette.co.uk - Review date: June 21, 2010

Wonderfully mythical... a story of guilt and alienation and the power of the sea to transform and heal.

Review by Brunonia Barry, author of New York Times bestseller

HarperCollins.co.uk

An ambitious and original debut novel set in a twilight zone between the thinking and unthinking realms. MacManus's vision, with its powerful narrative undertow, draws you down into the ocean's unseen currents…An atmospheric novel in which ideas surge upon the shoreline, creating a bracing place to build stories like sandcastles.

TimesOnline.co.uk - Review date: April 18, 2010

This is one of those rare things, a passionate book, written with feeling. Gripping drama plus well-drawn characters and a wonderfully absorbing and moving read.

DailyMail.co.uk - Review date: April 28, 2010

Borrowing from the old Scots folk tale of the skelpies, it's an expert and beautifully-crafted piece of work.

Scotsman.com

The sea in all its majesty, wonder, terror and secrecy, is the real star of this illuminating, learned novel.

Scotsman.com

A fine story in the tradition of real story-telling. Absorbing and enthralling.

Review by Salley Vickers best-selling author of Miss Garnet's Angel and other novels.

Scotsman.com

Rivetingly suspenseful, wholly credible and morally significant.

Review by John Darnton author of the best selling novel Black and White and Red All Over.

TimesOnline.co.uk - Review date: April 18, 2010

Have you ever wanted to just leave everything and disappear?

When Leo, the marine-biologist hero of James MacManus's adventurous first novel, is swept overboard during an academic assignment, apparently never to be seen again, death could almost be counted among the least of his worries. Not only has he lately been fired from his post at a Cape Cod oceanic institution, after imprudently publicising his outré theories on seal communication, he has also fallen from grace with the sea, following the tragic loss of his son in a sailing accident, and drifted vast emotional distances from his careworn wife, Margot, whose anonymous sexual trysts and undisguised drinking are sure signs of a marriage that has been visibly dashed against the rocks.

Rumours of the protagonist's demise look to have been greatly exaggerated, though, especially when a keen-eyed birdwatcher's sighting of a hirsute human form frolicking in the coastal waters with seals comes to the attention of the press. While MacManus keenly transmits his passion for his mammalian subjects and the destruction being wrought on their world, he never turns his arguments into an environmental screed, but instead seamlessly combines these issues du jour with good old-fashioned storytelling. The same is true of the individualistic touches he gives to what might otherwise be stock characters.

It could, of course, be reasonably argued that the novel either sinks or swims on whether the reader is prepared to swallow some rum plot developments, which become increasingly unmoored from reality. Glimpsing the author's note at the end of the book, in which he recalls his boyhood fantasy of metamorphosing into a seal, you could be forgiven for thinking he has allowed a certain element of wish fulfilment to overtake his narrative's more resilient naturalistic qualities. Nevertheless, this is an engaging, cinematically imagined tale of the kind that Hollywood laps up.

Review by Trevor Lewis

Wall Street Journal - Review date: May 28, 2011

In this unforgettable book the Celtic myth of the selkies-seals who shed their skin to become human – is turned inside-out and made startlingly plausible.

Review by Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

ABC News - Review date: May 9, 2011

James MacManus blends science and romance, producing a gripping combination for readers in The Language of the Sea.

Review by Mary Foster, ABC News