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Sophie Elmhirst

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

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“A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love. A dazzling book.” – Patrick Radden Keefe

“Stark, elemental, and sure to be a classic.” —Hampton Sides

“An enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” —Bill Bryson

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 in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn 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.

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About the Author

Sophie Elmhirst is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly forThe Guardian Long Read and The Economist; her work has also appeared inThe New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, andHarper’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 andA Marriage at Seais her first book.

  • Publication

    Riverhead Books

  • Genre

    Biography & Memoir
    History

  • Author

    Sophie Elmhirst

  • Language

    English

    Lexile:

  • Pages

    256

  • ISBN-13

    9780593854280

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