Julia and the Shark

Ten-year-old Julia narrates the story of the summer she lost her mum and found a shark older than trees. She lives in Hayle, Cornwall, with her father, Dan, a computer programmer, and her mother, Maura, a marine biologist. When Dan is hired to automate a remote lighthouse on the island of Unst in the Shetland archipelago, the northernmost part of Scotland, the family spends the summer there. Living near the Norwegian Sea brings Maura closer to what she truly wants to study: the Greenland shark, a creature that can live for approximately four hundred years and grows only one centimeter per year.

While waiting for a ferry, Maura explains that scientists dated the crystals in a shark's eyes to determine its age because its bones are too soft for traditional methods. Julia collects facts in a small yellow notebook, and the Greenland shark quickly becomes as fascinating to her as it is to her mother. When they arrive at the lighthouse, a cramped, damp tower above the sea, Julia climbs to the exterior platform at the top and discovers a boy at the railing. He swings over the side, descends a rusty ladder, mounts a hidden bicycle, and cycles away.

Julia encounters the boy again at a combined laundromat and library in town. His name is Kin, short for Kinshuk, which means "flower." His mother considers the lighthouse too dangerous, so Kin visits in secret. Julia returns a red-and-gold string she found near the ladder, which Kin identifies as a rakhi, a bracelet his sister Neeta gave him as part of a tradition symbolizing the bond between siblings. He explains the broken rakhi must be placed in the sea, so they walk to the quayside and throw it into the water.

Over chips on the quay, Maura reveals the personal reason behind her research. Her own mother, Grandma Julia, died of early-onset dementia, a condition in which the brain deteriorates prematurely. Maura believes the biological mechanism allowing Greenland sharks to age so slowly could someday help slow aging in humans. The research requires approximately fifteen million pounds in funding she has not yet secured.

Kin begins visiting the lighthouse at night with a brass telescope, showing Julia the constellations and explaining that stars have many names across cultures. He confides that a group of boys at school, led by Adrian, the grandson of Gin, the town shopkeeper, bully him about his name, his cultural background, and his inability to swim. Julia and Kin briefly fall out when Julia comments that it is strange for someone on an island not to swim. Kin is hurt; Adrian and the others have told him the island belongs to Vikings and that he cannot be one because his parents are from India.

Captain Bjorn Johansson, a Norwegian sailor Maura has chartered, cautions that Greenland sharks favor depths of over two thousand meters and are extremely difficult to find. Julia learns with alarm that Maura has chartered his boat for only two weeks. Maura returns from her first voyage without any sign of the shark.

Maura's behavior grows increasingly erratic. She stays away for nights at a time, returning either crackling with restless energy or withdrawn and distracted. Funding rejections arrive regularly. One day she bursts through the door with flowers and wine, eyes too wide and hands shaking, announcing she has bought Gin's old fishing boat to continue searching independently. She names the boat "Julia & the Shark," painting the title in yellow on the hull, and Julia and Kin help repair it. Maura alternates between frenzied activity and a glassy-eyed distance that reminds Julia of a buried memory: her mother crying in the garden when Julia was very small. Maura reacts with anguish when she discovers Julia deleted photos from her spare camera. The deleted images were of a starling murmuration at Gretna Green, a town on the Scottish border where Maura scattered Grandma Julia's ashes while pregnant with Julia.

On the night of a meteor shower, Julia and Kin cycle to a clifftop and discover Adrian and two friends around a fire. Adrian demands Kin's telescope, and in the scuffle Kin falls and lands on it. Drawing on Maura's advice about finding a bully's weakness, Julia attacks Adrian verbally, guessing correctly that his mother abandoned him. Adrian punches her. Kin is angry at Julia for her cruelty and cycles away.

Dan sits Julia down and explains that Maura's brain is complicated: Sometimes she feels almost too happy, and then the opposite happens and she becomes deeply sad. He confirms that Maura experienced a similar episode while pregnant with Julia after Grandma Julia's death.

Days later, Dan wakes Julia after midnight and takes Maura somewhere urgently, leaving Julia at Gin's flat above the shop. In the morning, Adrian inadvertently reveals that Maura is in the hospital because she took too many pills. Overwhelmed, Julia flees to the empty lighthouse, where she finds a photo of Maura pregnant and hollow-eyed with the words "Never Again" on the back. Julia fears this refers to having her.

Captain Bjorn arrives unaware of Maura's hospitalization and tells Julia a Greenland shark has been sighted near the surface. He hands her coordinates, saying if Maura leaves within the hour she can reach it by evening. After he leaves, Julia grips the boat keys from Maura's raincoat and resolves to find the shark herself, believing that proving it exists will make Maura recover.

Julia launches the boat with Noodle, the family cat, aboard. The harbor master warns of an approaching storm. After more than six hours at sea, Julia falls asleep and wakes near midnight to violent weather. The radar detects something enormous meters away. In a flash of lightning, she sees a vast expanse of greenish, scarred skin just below the surface. It is the Greenland shark. Julia fires a transmitter tag at the shark as it dives, but the effort tips her balance and she plunges into the freezing sea. Maura's heavy rubber raincoat drags her downward. Then something nudges her legs, rough and alive, and pushes her upward. Lights appear above the surface, and a life ring slaps the water. Julia lets go of the coat and kicks toward the light.

Captain Bjorn rescues her, having encountered Adrian and Kin, who were searching for Julia, and used Kin's telescope to spot the boat's wake. An air ambulance flies Julia to the hospital on Mainland, Shetland, where Maura is an inpatient in the psychiatric ward. Maura tells Julia the name for her condition: bipolar disorder, a mental health condition in which moods swing between extreme highs and devastating lows. Dan confirms that "Never Again" referred to Maura never wanting to feel that way again, not to having Julia. Maura tells Julia she is giving up the shark research to focus on getting well, choosing her health and her family. Kin visits and gives Julia a new navy blue notebook with a gold J on the front.

Months later, both families meet at Gretna Green to watch a murmuration, the phenomenon of thousands of starlings flying in vast, coordinated patterns before roosting. Maura is back to herself, working but not so intensely that anyone needs to worry. The boat has been donated to Kin's family and converted into a floating library. Julia ties a handmade rakhi of blue and silver, for the sea and the stars, around Kin's wrist, a sign they are family now. As the starlings sweep the sky at dusk, Maura takes Julia's hand. Julia reflects that she lost not her mother but her idea of her mother as perfect and invincible. Finding the real Maura, complicated and imperfect, only deepened her love. She understands now that she spent the summer trying to fix Maura, when only Maura could do that for herself.