Gilbert Cruz: When I was setting out on writing the book, I knew it wasn't just the story of the catastrophe that I wanted to write. What had pulled me into it initially was the idea of this happening to a marriage as much as to two individuals and what that would feel like from the inside. I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review from the New York Times. Today I would like to bring back an episode from our archives. It's about a book that has real beach vibes. There's a lot of water. It's a relationship drama and it's also a daring story of survival. Marriage at Sea, a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck, made it onto the book reviews top 10 books of 2025, and it was one of my personal favorites last year as well. It tells the unbelievable story of a British couple in the 1970s [music] who try to sail around the world. They're trying to reach New Zealand and they almost make it, but their boat gets capsized by a whale in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean and they're forced to survive there for quite a while. The paperback edition of Marriage at Sea just came out a few weeks ago, and I think it's a perfect summer read. [music] Here's my conversation from last year with the author, Sophie Elmhirst. Hello, Sophie.

Sophie Elmhirst: Hi. Great to be here.

Gilbert Cruz: I hope you enjoy it. How do you describe this book to people without giving away the entire story? Unless you want to give away the entire story. Tell us about it.

Sophie Elmhirst: Sure. I guess it's obviously on one level a story of a catastrophe, right? It's this couple who set sail. They were trying to immigrate in their tiny boat and go to New Zealand as you said, and there they are halfway around the world and they're hit by a whale. And in terms of how not to give away the whole thing, I don't think there needs to be a secret about the fact they survived, right? Because it's a story of their whole lives as much as anything. And I was just as interested in the aftermath of what they went through as I was in the endurance of it in itself. And I guess what I tend not to do is give away how exactly they're rescued. Try and hold something back.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay, we won't do that here. When did you first hear about this story?

Sophie Elmhirst: So, it was a while ago. I was researching a piece, I'm a journalist, about people trying to escape, especially escape the land. And I found myself trolling around, as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories. And there were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who had pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black and white picture of a man and a woman. and she caught my eye because she was rare in this crowd. And I could tell also that there was something about them that seemed oddly familiar. And I don't know whether that's just me projecting in hindsight, but once I discovered they were English in the 1970s and just once I started learning more about them as characters, there was just something very identifiable about them as something culturally quite specific that felt familiar to me and all sorts of things that were just immediately fascinating and deeply unfamiliar such as why you want to do something like this in the first place.

Gilbert Cruz: Now, this is the compelling nugget of a story, the nucleus of a story, but as you say, you're a working journalist who you come across stories all the time presumably. Why was this the one to focus your first book on?

Sophie Elmhirst: I'd been hunting, as you do for a while, and as you said, I'm always writing stories of one kind or another, and like inevitably, I could tell the story was special. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before. Couldn't believe it had been forgotten. It's so extreme in its drama. The sheer length of time they're drifting in the Pacific, the behaviors they have to resort to, the beheading of turtles and eating of raw fish and eyeballs and all of this stuff is just it's gold, right? It's the material is incredibly rich. But I think I just knew from the start it wasn't that wasn't enough. That wasn't going to be the whole story or couldn't be the whole story or at least it wouldn't be enough for a book just to have the extremity, just to have the drama. And so it really relied on finding this rich body of material from their own writing, their own books, but also their diaries, photographs, people who survived them because sadly they weren't alive anymore when I started my research, but friends and family and all these people I could talk to who could really bring them to life because I guess I knew from the beginning that if it needed to be or if I wanted it to be a story of I suppose the sort of interior process of going through something like this, but also the quite a sort of intimate examination of a marriage going through something like this. Then I needed to really get under their skin and that would require I don't know to put it in journalistic terms a level of access that that wouldn't be there just on the surface events. It needed another layer I guess to it.

Gilbert Cruz: You refer to some of the details involved in them being on the open seas for months and months. But it starts with these two people coming together

Sophie Elmhirst: sources. I drew a lot from their books and their writing and interviews they gave radio, TV, press interviews over the years. There was a huge amount of just them directly talking and writing to draw which was incredible. But it was also I knew limited to a certain extent in that while it could give some of that interiority and sense of thought process and in the case of her diary very immediate thought and reaction about what they were going through it was literally day by day written and drawn while she was there on the raft which was an incredible thing to be able to have but you're also then only reliant on their account of themselves. And I think what I also really wanted to do was to try and step outside them and understand their marriage from the outside to understand their characters in ways that they might not have described themselves. And that that was hugely to do with the people I spoke to, friends of theirs relations, people who'd sailed with them. There were a couple of old friends, Colin Foskar in particular, who was the last living member of these two married couples who were friends from before they set off on this journey and then accompanied them on the the second big voyage they did after after this one. And so he'd spent months on a boat with both of them. So he was just an incredibly generous interviewee and could really tell me what that was like from the perspective of of someone in in that very confined and challenging and relentless space of a boat and having to do all the things that you have to do on a voyage like that. And I think that it was talking to him also that really gave me that I suppose such a that different perspective on Morris and some of his complexities and particularities especially later in life. And was really important for me to tell that that side of the story to cast forward into old age and to see what these lives that had this extraordinary episode early on in their life what those lives became. I there's a version of the book that could have just ended with their rescue, but that that was never the one I wanted to tell. And yeah, I really depended on on friends and neighbors and people who worked in cafes where they went, all sorts of different people to fill in a lot of those gaps.

Gilbert Cruz: Sophie, you often see this phrase with a a non-fiction book like this, it's so gripping it reads like a novel, which is great marketing, but as a journalist speaking to a journalist. I'm curious about how you try to achieve that effect while also understanding that non-fiction has to exist as its own thing and it's good in its own right and it doesn't necessarily need to be compared to a novel in order to be gripping.

Sophie Elmhirst: The whole idea of the non-fiction novel or narrative non-fiction, you know, this is nothing new. I feel like in America you guys do it and have been doing it for many decades and very famously. And I think part of me was very consciously trying to emulate some of the books that have meant a lot to me over the years from I don't know Truman Capote to Joan Didion or all sorts of amazing writers who have achieved that kind of narrative propulsion while writing about real events. What caught me about the story and made me think it was a book was like I said before the intimacy part of it and the character part of it that sense of being inside people's minds and of really trying to understand almost in real time their motivations and why they do what they do. Those are all things that I suppose you find more often in novels. And so I guess inevitably I ended up borrowing some of the novelistic devices and stretching I suppose some of the limits of non-fiction in order to do that.

Gilbert Cruz: Sophie, surely you and this happened to me while I was reading the book. You have thought about whether or not you or you and a loved one would be able to survive under similar circumstances. Would you?

Sophie Elmhirst: Oh heck no. My husband and I had this conversation very early on and he was very blunt and said he would just slide over the edge on day two with a little kind of salute. And I figured that I might have a couple more days than me or some sort of stubborn desire to carry on. But you know part again like one of the reasons I was drawn to this story and these people was because immediately I identified much more strongly with Morris than I did with Marilyn. I wished I was a Marilyn and I wish I had her sort of fortitude and optimism and pragmatism, but I lack in all those departments and make up for them in anxiety and self-doubt. I don't hold that much hope for myself in such a scenario. I don't know. I like to think we can all maybe we would all surprise ourselves with some of those, you know, survival qualities we didn't know we had. Some sort of resilience would kick in and maybe we'd all be strangling seabirds within a couple of weeks. Is this a thing that happens now when you go to parties or when you go to dinners? People go around the table and say, "Okay, how long do you think you would survive on a raft at sea?"

Gilbert Cruz: Is this a thing that happens now when you go to parties or when you go to dinners? People go around the table and say, "Okay, how long do you think you would survive on a raft at sea?"

Sophie Elmhirst: Yeah. You know what happens a lot which I am really enjoying is that people come up to me at a reading or something and just tell me what would happen in their own marriage or their own partnership. Oh my god. Like he I couldn't trust him. He'd be a disaster or and they just Yeah. I get there's quite an intimate download on who performs what role in their marriage. It does seem to be a prison through which people can quite quickly analyze the their respective roles and skills or lack of them in their marriage which it's been enlightening that's for sure.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm definitely going to start asking my friends, who would you be on this raft? How long do you think you can survive? [music] Sophie, you've survived this interview. Thank you very much for speaking to us about your new book, A Marriage at Sea. It's such a great read. I'm so happy you joined us here.

Sophie Elmhirst: Thanks so much for having me.

Gilbert Cruz: A marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck, is now available in paperback. The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, [music] and Patricia Subaran. It's edited by Tracy Mumford and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Baup. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at the bookreview@nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. [music] Thanks for listening. [music]