Seven years ago, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (Villard) and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (W.W. Norton) began their ascent of bestseller lists across the country, revitalizing the adventure category. The genre has been fiercely competitive ever since, especially during the summer months, though few have approached the heights reached by Krakauer and Junger.

Leading this season's contenders is Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of WWII (Random House, July). Written by Esquire staff writer Robert Kurson, it centers on two amateur divers who discovered a World War II German U-2 boat off the coast of New Jersey, with the remains of its 55-member crew still aboard. Juxtaposing the divers' harrowing attempt to recover the vessel in deep waters with their commitment to understanding its strategic mission, which was undocumented by either the U.S. or German governments, Shadow Divers is a tale of how ordinary people were able to rewrite history. Advance orders already stand at 120,000.

"I haven't gotten this kind of response since Seabiscuit," said Random House editorial director Jonathan Karp, who signed up Laura Hillenbrand's hardcover and paperback blockbuster. "Robert Kurson is one of the most exciting talents I've come across in a long time," he added, noting that his debut will be excerpted in Esquire and is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program.

From HarperCollins, also in July, comes The Last Run: A True Story of Rescue and Redemption on the Alaska Seas by Todd Lewan. Based on a five-part series he wrote for the Associated Press (the first series in the wire service's history), The Last Run chronicles a Coast Guard rescue of a group of down-on-their-luck commercial fishermen, who were cast into Arctic waters when their ship, weighted down with the catch of their lives, could not withstand a dramatic storm.

Executive editor Dan Conaway, who inherited the project when acquiring editor Paul McCarthy left Harper, sees The Last Run as a helicopter rescue story modeled on Black Hawk Down. "It's got all the literary signposts you want: rich characters, dramatic setting, and it's also a flat-out page-turner," he said. Already selected as a B&N Discover pick, the book will be excerpted in Playboy. Harper plans a 75,000-copy first printing.

Fans of salty sea tales already know Linda Greenlaw as the ship captain who warned the doomed sailors in The Perfect Storm, which helped make her first two books, The Hungry Ocean (Little, Brown, 1999) and The Lobster Chronicles (Hyperion, 2002) into bestsellers in their own right. Now she's back with her third book, the collection of tall tales All Fishermen Are Liars (Hyperion, July).

"She has you on the edge of your seat one minute then completely cracks you up the next," said Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe. "I can't think of anyone who satisfies all the needs of adventure lovers but also makes them laugh." The house is planning a 125,000-copy first printing for Greenlaw's latest, based on combined hard and softcover sales of more than 500,000 for her first book, and more than 250,000 for her second.

Booksellers Gear Up for Breakouts

At B&N, publicity director Carolyn Brown reports that Shadow Divers has already drawn comparisons—as a nonfiction title with legs—to John Berendt's long-running bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Seabiscuit. "It will be handsold by our booksellers who have given nothing but rave reviews for the title," she said. Borders, too, is positioning the book as a major summer read that will be driven by reviews and word-of-mouth.

For many independent booksellers, Shadow Divers and The Last Run clearly stand out in a category that's already one of the most active in many stores. At Title Wave Books in Anchorage, Alaska, owner Steve Lloyd was wowed by The Last Run. "The author really puts the reader out there in the helicopter," he said about the suspenseful scene where Coast Guard pilots fly through tremendous headwinds trying to save the fishermen. A scuba diver himself, Lloyd read an advance copy of Shadow Divers en route to a diving trade show in New Jersey last February, where buzz about the book and author were running high. For someone who's not a diver, Kurson did "a really excellent job of accurately writing about the challenges of deep wreck diving," Lloyd observed.

At Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, owner Vivien Jennings will also cross-market the two titles, which she expects to sell just as well in the heartland as on the coasts. "We'll pull up our lists of people who bought books like [Shadow Divers] in the past and then we'll personally call them," she said.

When PW spoke with Alaine Borgias at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., she had just booked Lewan for an author appearance, and was looking forward to Greenlaw's latest. "What's nice is that her books, although of course written by a woman, are also for men," said Borgias. "And they're very personal—adventure books are not always written by the person who has the adventure."

What is it about the sea that keeps readers returning book after book? "We're in control of so much," offered Borgias. "The great unknown sea is a powerful force we can't control."