The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In "A Marriage at Sea," British journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the gripping story of a British husband and wife in 1970s England who took to the high seas and found themselves stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale sank their boat. As Elmhirst tells host Gilbert Cruz, it's a story of personal survival, but it's also one about how a marriage holds together under the most stressful circumstances imaginable.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.
0:13.2	I hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July holiday, everyone, and that you have found some time to relax somewhere and pick up a book that you'd been looking forward to.
0:22.7	The subject of this week's episode is one that I have been looking forward to for several months.
0:27.8	In June, 1972 Maurice and Marilyn Bailey left England,
0:33.0	intending to put their home country behind them and sail for New Zealand on Orleans,
0:38.2	the boat that they gave up everything to build. They had made it as far as the Pacific Ocean, the vast Pacific Ocean,
0:43.8	nine months later, when a whale slammed into Orlin, sinking it. Their story of survival is the
0:49.5	subject of the new book, A Marriage at Sea, A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck.
0:55.8	That book's author, Sophie Elmhurst, is here with us.
1:01.0	Hello, Sophie.
1:02.4	Hi. Great to be here.
1:04.3	So your book has been out in England, where you're calling in from, for more than a year.
1:09.4	So I imagine you're quite expert at talking about it by now.
1:13.5	But how do you describe this book to people without giving away the entire story,
1:19.4	unless you want to give away the entire story?
1:21.1	Tell us about it.
1:22.2	Sure.
1:22.7	I guess it's obviously on one level a story of a catastrophe, right?
1:26.9	It's this couple who set sail.
1:28.9	They were trying to emigrate in their tiny boat and go to New Zealand, as you said,
1:33.0	and there they are halfway around the world, and they're hit by a whale.
1:37.2	But I guess for me, anyway, as writing the book, or when I was setting out on writing the book,
	...

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