Sea State

Tabitha Lasley was in her mid-thirties and recently out of a painful relationship when she left her post at a London magazine. Using her savings, she rented a six-month flat in Aberdeen, Scotland, to finally pursue a book she had long put off, one about oil rigs and the men who crew them. Her reason was simple: she wanted to know how men behaved when women were absent.

In Aberdeen she immersed herself in the roughneck subculture, a close-knit world of fights, punishing physical labour, rivalry and friendships that run unusually deep. As the months passed, she began to realise that her own presence was unsettling the men, and herself too.

The book works on two levels. It documents an industry that rarely gets attention, where offshore work has shaped the lives of generations of mostly working-class men. Lasley also uses it to explore class, masculinity, the dynamics of desire, and how the promise of a stable life can feel out of reach. Alongside this, it follows a journalist whose objectivity about her subject is slowly wearing thin.

In Aberdeen, Lasley drinks, takes drugs and dances freely, revisiting the years of her youth when the music was better and the men were less trustworthy. Two decades on, she becomes involved with Caden, a married rig worker who alternates three weeks at sea with three weeks at home. Isolated and emotionally fragile, she lets herself be drawn into their growing attraction, and the affair that follows is volatile and reckless, leaving them both exposed.