Review by Booklist Review
An award-winner and best-seller in the UK, where it was released in 2024 as Maurice and Maralyn, this stranger-than-fiction true story opens with an otherworldly wreck. Ending the night watch on their sailboat somewhere in the Pacific early on a March morning in 1973, Maralyn Bailey goes below deck to wake her husband, Maurice, and feels "a crack, a jolt, the sound of a gun going off." From the deck, the couple can see a sperm whale, bleeding and writhing in distress. Über-prepared as they are, the married sailors can't save their boat, which they had planned to take from England all the way to New Zealand. They gather their emergency supplies onto a raft and hope for rescue. As the days tick on, reaching the triple digits, the suspense is almost unbearably high, what the couple weathers truly unbelievable, and the book impossible to put down. British journalist Elmhirst nimbly and skillfully relates the story's intensely dramatic moments while folding in the couple's history. Almost every page underscores that Maurice and Maralyn, who met and married in Derby, England, in 1962 and quickly realized that typical English life--possibly any life on land--was not for them, were made for each other. A jaw-dropping and gripping survival story.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A tale of an adventure gone definitively wrong. A maritime bookend of sorts to Jon Krakauer'sInto the Wild, British journalist Elmhirst's narrative turns on two 1960s-era British dreamers who decided to pitch it all in and sail from grim, gray Britain around the globe to New Zealand, "discovering new lands on the other side of the world." In the course of researching a quite different magazine piece, the author discovered the story of Maurice Bailey, a printer by trade, who took a studious approach to the voyage, learning navigation and reading and rereading reference books. His wife, Maralyn, was eminently practical--certainly more so than Maurice, who insisted on having no radio transmitter aboard to "preserve their freedom from outside interference." That would prove a consequential decision when a whale collided with their boat and sank it--though, Elmhirst notes provocatively, there is a lingering question of whether the Baileys might have abandoned the craft prematurely. In any case, they floated, adrift and without a clue as to their location in the vast Pacific, for 117 days until finally being spotted, quite by chance, by a passing South Korean fishing boat, whose crew prove to be heroes in Elmhirst's telling. Skeletal, having nearly starved to death, the Baileys were slowly nursed back to health. Astoundingly, Elmhirst writes, no sooner did the couple return to England than they began planning another maritime adventure. Maralyn emerges as the real hero of the story; for those fraught months at sea, having gauged Maurice's inability to see the job through, she took command of the expedition and kept the two alive. Countering "his despair" with "her resolution," she later recalled, "I discover that men may be physically the stronger of the sexes but mentally women are tops." A nimbly told story that should serve as a caution--but oddly, too, as inspiration--to would-be escapists. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
