A Marriage at Sea
A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
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4.1 • 401 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025
ALSO NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY NPR, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, AND MORE
“This is nonfiction that reads like fiction – the best kind. Elmhirst’s retelling is a triumph, second only to the seemingly impossible feat of Maurice and Maralyn themselves. You won’t be able to put it down.” – USA Today
“Remarkable… I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth.” – The New York Times
“Such an emotionally vivid portrait of a couple in isolation that I was shocked it wasn’t fiction. How could a writer get so deeply into the minds of two real people in such extraordinary circumstances? … So brilliantly depicted.” – Elle
“A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love. A dazzling book.” – Patrick Radden Keefe
“An enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” —Bill Bryson
An instant New York Times bestseller, this is 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We were blown away by this true story of how a couple—and their marriage—survived being lost at sea for a staggering 118 days. In 1972, Maralyn and Maurice Bailey were both excited to take an open-ended journey across the Pacific, leaving society’s rules and expectations behind. But their world changed forever when a fluke accident left them adrift in the open ocean in a small, inflatable lifeboat. Author Sophie Elmhirst takes her time letting us get to know Maralyn and Maurice before their journey even begins, which is brilliant—because when the unthinkable happens, the story isn’t just about the catastrophe but also about how two partners with wildly different personalities face it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Elmhirst debuts with an enthralling story of survival. In spring 1973, a British couple felt their sailboat shudder as a flailing, dying whale punched a hole in its hull. Months earlier, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had sold their possessions, abandoned "suburban domestic stress," and embarked in their sloop Auralyn for a new life at sea. Maurice—an odd, prickly perfectionist—wanted to sail "by the stars," so the boat had no radio transmitter. As the Auralyn sank, the couple scrambled onto a tiny inflatable raft with what food and water they could grab. Maurice despaired; Maralyn—a pretty, confident go-getter—was sure they'd be rescued. And they were, but only after 118 days adrift, during which they bludgeoned sea turtles to death, slurped water from fish eyes, caught sharks with their bare hands, and watched multiple ships sail past without noticing them. Maralyn's iron will kept them alive, through her implementation of routines and innovations like safety pin fishhooks. The grisly details of survival are narrated by Elmhirst with vivid immediacy, and her handling of the lead-up and the aftermath are equally fascinating—including the couple's post-rescue celebrity (when they were frequently asked to climb into their raft for photo shoots) and the surly Maurice's alienation of everyone but his wife ahead of their even more self-isolating trip. It's an un-put-downable saga of a relationship pushed to the limits.
Customer Reviews
Captivating tale of life, marriage and survival at sea and beyond.
Elmirst does the most beautiful job of weaving the lives of Maralyn and Maurice together in a riveting story that is hard to put down. The day-to-day details of their marriage are just as interesting and emotional as the survival story in the Pacific. The reader is only occasionally reminded that the narrative is informed by journal entries, interviews, news articles and the like by a quote here and there. Mostly the Bailey’s story reads like a fiction novel. It is sweet, challenging, emotional and moving with a satisfy ending; a landing that is often hard to stick with biographical accounts.
Marriage at sea
It was a page turner for me. Read it in two days, because I couldn’t wait to see how it all turned out. The end, brought us to the end of an ordinary person, who like us all are extraordinary, really. Yes he did live some amazingly interesting adventures, but his story is one of love, survival of life in general.
Great read
A fascinating story of love amidst the personal tragedy of a shipwreck. I couldn’t put it down.