YM Abdel-Magied brings real-life engineering experience to her first novel, a tale of ambition, greed and the deadly fury of Mother Nature in the face of Big Oil. Born in Sudan, her first job was in a coal mine in Australia, and she later trained and worked internationally as a drilling engineer.
Abdel-Magied speaks to novelist Caoilinn Hughes about At Sea, in which a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster – and when all her warnings are ignored, she realises that the real danger may lie in the cold calculations and base desires of the men determined to finish the operation as quickly and cheaply as possible. Can she prevent the looming catastrophe that threatens the rig, the crew and the sea before it’s too late?
