Hi, I'm Melissa Adwarnie, and this is NPR's book of the day.

Daniel Krause is this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

He won for the book Angel Down, a book about a group of soldiers in World War I.

It's a genre bender, with elements of horror, magical realism, and science fiction.

And it's written in a single sentence. Krauss has always

liked literary conceits and unique structures. In his 2023 book, Whale Fall, about a 17-year-old

diver who has only an hour of oxygen left on his tank, he plays with chapter length to show

the reader just how much time is left on the clock.

That book is the basis for a film coming out this fall.

In today's episode, we thought we'd revisit a conversation about whale fall that Krauss had with NPR's Aisha Rosco.

How deep would you dive to retrieve something or someone you lost from the past?

In Daniel Krause's new book, Whalefall, 17-year-old Jay has one hour of oxygen to make it to treacherous depths along Monterey, California, and bring back his father's skeleton.

But before he can, he's swallowed alive by a giant sperm well.

Krause's novel is a thriller and it really gets the heart pumping.

But even as almost every chapter leads with Jay's oxygen depleting,

there's still time to reflect on his regrets,

on his upbringing, on his father.

The book is really about death in a lot of ways.

I mean, the story begins with the diver's father already dead.

And the idea of a whale fall, which is a giant whale who sinks to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean and the corpse lands, what it really does is it creates life.

And it creates centuries worth of life because of its decomposition.

And I thought it was kind of a beautiful metaphor for what the book is about

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