A true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck
By Sophie Elmhirst
Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
In the late 1960s, a young British middle-class married couple named Maralyn and Maurice were growing restless. She was charismatic and ambitious and he awkward and obsessive, though both shared a fear of wasting their lives as well as a dream of escaping from it all. After quitting their jobs, selling their house and Vauxhall Cresta and buying a boat, they set sail in June 1972.
Their adventure went well for almost a year. Then, in a remote part of the Pacific, a breaching whale punched a hole in their boat’s hull and it sank. Alone together in a tiny life raft, Maralyn and Maurice drifted for months, starving, exhausted and with scant hope of being rescued. Even catching a fish to eat led to a punctured and deflating raft that needed constant bailing.
Staying alive was challenge enough, but the couple also had to fight inner demons and find ways to get along as their marriage was put to a test neither could have imagined.
An award-winning journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian the Long Read and The Economist, Sophie Elmhirst’s work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar. She’s a winner of the British Press Award for Feature Writer of the Year and a Foreign Press Award. She lives in London. ■
