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Sophie Elmhirst

Biography

Sophie Elmhirst

Sophie Elmhirst is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist; her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, among other places. She’s the winner of the British Press Award for Feature Writer of the Year and a Foreign Press Award. She lives in London, and A MARRIAGE AT SEA is her first book.

Sophie Elmhirst

Books by Sophie Elmhirst

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
by Sophie Elmhirst - Biography, History, Nonfiction

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 of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat and sailed away? So 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.