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A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
by Sophie Elmhirst
The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits.
Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He's a loner, awkward and obsessive; she's charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?
Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.
What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can't run away from themselves.
Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.
Barak Obama's 2025 Summer Reading List
1m Since someone mentioned it, https://barackobama.medium.com/my-2025-summer-reading-list-bb25331e761b here you go : • Mark Twain — Ron Chernow A comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history. • The Book of Records — Madeleine Thien A bea...
-kim.kovacs
Kirkus finalists announced!
FICTION https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-3077-0015-5 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063318779 The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner Books) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593730089 Isola by Allegra Goodman (Dial Pres...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (7/24/2025)
...is fiction based on real events when 27 migrants drowned in the English Channel. It is only 120 pages of very interesting perspectives. Listening to A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst. A true story of a couple who survived being lost at sea for over 100 days. Just started The Highest Law in the Land by Jessica Pishko about constitu...
-Anne_Glasgow
What are you reading this week? (7/17/2025)
I'm reading A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst. Based on a true story, this novel depicts the story of a couple who buy a boat and decide to sail the world! A close encounter with a whale ends the...
-Jorene_J
"A nimbly told story that should serve as a caution—but oddly, too, as inspiration—to would-be escapists." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about A Marriage at Sea was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sophie Elmhirst is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist; her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper's Bazaar, among other places. She's the winner of the British Press Award for Feature Writer of the Year and a Foreign Press Award. She lives in London and A Marriage at Sea is her first book.
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