A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst PB

A runaway New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2025, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, this true story of love and survival has also been named a Best Book of 2025 by NPR, Vogue, Time, and The New Yorker. Here in the cove, we understand why.

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 a dream most of us only daydream about: quit the jobs, sell the house, buy a boat, sail away.

In June 1972, they actually did it. For nearly a year, all went well. Then, deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it slipped beneath the waves.

What follows is a jaw-dropping fight to stay alive in a tiny rubber raft. Months alone together. Starving, exhausted, and facing not only the open ocean but each other, as inner demons surface and their marriage is stretched to its limits. They could run from the world. They couldn’t run from themselves.

USA Today called it “nonfiction that reads like fiction – the best kind,” and Bill Bryson praised it as “an enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” Elle admitted being “shocked it wasn’t fiction.”

Taut, propulsive, and quietly devastating, this is a high-seas adventure wrapped around a tender meditation on why we love difficult people, and who we become when everything is stripped away.

Read it with the harbor in view and a warm mug nearby. You’ll be grateful for solid ground beneath your feet. Available in hardcover and trade paperback.

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