Beyond the Sea

A haunting story of two men stranded at sea pushing against their limits to stay alive, by the Booker Prize–winning author of Prophet Song.

Paul Lynch's haunting and sublime novel Beyond the Sea tells the story of two South American fishermen, Bolivar and Hector, who go to sea before a catastrophic storm, despite warnings. The storm arrives, and though the two men survive, they are blown hundreds of miles out into the Pacific Ocean, with little hope of rescue. Coming to terms with their new reality, the men are forced to accept their separation from the modern world, their sudden and inescapable intimacy, and the limits of hope, survival, and faith. Part gripping survival story, part fearless existential parable, Beyond the Sea is a meditation on what it means to be a man, a friend, a father, and a sinner in our fallen world. With searing, evocative prose, Paul Lynch crafts a mythic drama that refuses sentimentality and easy answers. Instead Beyond the Sea is a hard-won and intimate rendering of the extremes of human life, both physical and mental. It is an ambitious and profoundly moving story.

Praise for Beyond the Sea

"[This] stark, mesmerizing book reads like an existential argument between [life's] irreconcilable truths, a Beckett play bobbing in the open water. . . . This fine book contains multitudes of experience." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"An epic with, as epics should have, more than a touch of poetry about it, and possibly the grimmest, but also most beautifully written, novel set at sea that I have read since William Golding's Pincher Martin." —Andrew Stuttaford, New Criterion

"A lucid, lyrical tale. . . . Lynch's spare and precise novel has a detached, almost mythical quality." —The Irish Times