Everything you need to know about Shark Drunk.

Every so often, a book comes quietly out of the blue and catches the world on its hook. This summer, the UK is set to fall, line and sinker, for the unlikely charms of a volume of quixotic reportage about fishing. Shark Drunk: The Art Of Catching A Large Shark From A Tiny Rubber Dinghy In A Big Ocean, has won five awards in Norway, its native country. Now Mr Morten Strøksnes’ true-life tale is being published in English, with rights sold in 21 countries. If the ongoing mindfulness trend and recent buzz about hygge are anything to go by, this fishy non-fiction is going to be catch of the day.

Shark Drunk is a book in which nothing happens several times over, while two old pals drink boxes of red wine in a small boat. Ostensibly, it’s about the quest embarked on by writer Mr Strøksnes and painter Mr Hugo Aasjord to catch a Greenland shark – a giant beast of almost mythical proportions – in the icy waters of Norway’s remote Lofoten Islands. Really, it’s about the wonders of nature we seldom take time to appreciate, and the warmth of true friendship that we need space, and sometimes silence, to feel.

The writing is worth savouring for its own sake. Wry humour gives way to vivid description. From the water, the world “seems cleansed and full of mirrors”. Mr Strøksnes allows his thoughts to slip their moorings. He reads rare books about ancient sea monsters. He researches plankton. He attacks the shortsightedness of trawling, which destroys coral forests. He reflects that man is really just a “rebuilt fish”, and wonders whether seals dream.

Scientific and existential digressions aside, the Greenland shark exerts a powerful pull on the author’s imagination. Examples have been recorded as 26ft long and weighing in excess of a tonne, and it is thought to live up to 400 years, and possibly beyond. Its fluorescent green eyes dangle with parasites, and its flesh is so full of poison that it sends anyone who eats it into a hallucinatory trance: the origin of the phrase “shark drunk”. These are – not to use the Latin – big, ugly bastards. And if you do manage to haul one up several hundred feet, you’re going to want to be in a large and comprehensively equipped fishing vessel – not a tiny rubber dinghy.

But the tribulations of catching a Greenland shark don’t start with the first wrench on the line. First you need to get bait, and nothing gives this species an appetite like the stench of death. So, a few pages in, Mr Strøksnes is sent off to bag-up the rotting corpse of a highland bull. Mr Aasjord declines the task on the grounds he has not been able to vomit since a botched childhood operation. It’s the first, comic indication of a tension between the two men. Along with the smell of maggoty bull seeping from the hull, this steers the book well clear of whimsy.

Mr Strøksnes is almost as fascinated by his friend as he is by the Greenland shark. Mr Aasjord paints large abstracts inspired by the curious coastal light of Northern Norway. As their obsessive sailing missions drag on from season to season, hobbled by howling storms and temperamental boat engines, Mr Strøksnes starts to notice a change in his friends’ paintings. They are now haunted by the dark, unmistakable form of the Greenland shark.

Why are these two men so desperate to catch one? Its liver will make great oil paint. But Mr Strøksnes begins to suspect they have deeper motives. More people have travelled to space than into the ocean depths, he observes. But “maybe, like the universe, our consciousness is expanding”. Shark Drunk is a book that does just that, immersing you in a watery world where human life recedes to a pinprick of light. It’s a long while before your thoughts make it back to the surface.

Shark Drunk: The Art Of Catching A Large Shark From A Tiny Rubber Dinghy In A Big Ocean (Jonathan Cape) is out now

Keep up to date with The Daily by signing up to our weekly email roundup. Click here to update your email preferences