Journalist and author Sophie Elmhirst stumbled upon an amazing true story largely set in the early 1970s and has turned it into a fascinating book. A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck relates how a “odd couple”—Maurice, the difficult, particular loner and practical, questing Maralyn—decide to abandon their humdrum lives in England and fling their life savings into a small boat they use to sail toward New Zealand. A year in, a dying whale sinks their vessel and they find themselves adrift on a teeny dinghy tethered to a life raft. What ensues is a horrendous, yet (in the hands of such a wonderful writer) rousing ordeal that tests every fiber of their bodies, as well as their relationship. At the time, their story was huge news for a long time, and both Maurice and Maralyn wrote copiously about their lives, so the author’s task does not want for material, rather her achievement in A Marriage at Sea is a stylish, ruminative curation of two lives under stress. This is a page-turning, wise book that will, I suspect, end up in many a Christmas stocking and rightly so.
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