Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

Héctor Tobar

Oct 2014 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Deep Down Dark is the novel that inspired the film The 33 starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Cote de Pablo and Antonio Banderas.

When the San José mine collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. After the disaster, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales, and in Deep Down Dark, he brings them to haunting, visceral life. We learn what it was like to be imprisoned inside a mountain, understand the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and experience the awe of working in such a place-underground passages filled with danger and that often felt alive. A masterwork of narrative journalism and a stirring testament to the power of the human spirit, The 33: Deep Down Dark captures the profound ways in which the lives of everyone involved in the catastrophe were forever changed.

A Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award
A Finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Selected for NPR's Morning Edition Book Club

Ratings and reviews

Very well written. The author takes you, the reader, into the mine that help 33 men for 69 days. You fell the joys, fears, triumphs and collapses of "The 33" as they deal with their experiences. The last part of the book covers the effect the event had on those men. It should be required reading for anyone who has or expects to be suddenly thrust into the lime light. It gives a hint of the issues that might envelope and take control of your life.

Even though we knew the story and how it turned out, the author wrote an interesting story that kept us sitting on the edge of our seats. Very well written.

Inspirational account of perseverance against apparent odds against success

About the author

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller, Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He's written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.