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SPOILER ALERT in review. In 1973 a British couple sailing to New Zealand (with no radios or transmitters) collided with a whale. Their boat sank and yet somehow they survived, lost at sea, with only a life raft and dingy for 117 days. Author Sophia Elmhirst not only resurrects this couple’s 50 year old saga but humanizes it in her NY Times best selling book A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck. This is incredible reporting that reads like a novel as she turns a harrowing survival tale into a portrait of a marriage and a broader reflection on escapism and the human spirit.
Elmhirst writes beautifully as she draws upon a wide variety of sources to bring the readers to a liferaft-side seat as they watch the couple face starvation, thirst, despair, and loneliness. As I listened to the audible narrator, I started to wonder if they would survive or if this book was re-created from lost journals. Once they are rescued, however, the book started to lose its power–it felt like a much too long denouement. It didn’t help either that the husband was not a particularly likable character–I ended up wondering what his wife really saw in him. The fact that the book didn’t convince me on this gap means that he either was a self-involved miserable person…or that the source material just wasn’t there.
For Further Study:
117 Days Adrift
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