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Good morning everyone I thought I’d do another One Book Leads To Another feature today. I read Maurice And Maralyn last year and absolutely loved it. I’ve always been drawn to real life survival stories and their story was a very special one.

I’ve been hearing lots of great things about The Wager and I’m looking forward to diving into another shipwreck story soon. This one is historical and about an event I don’t know anything about which I always enjoy.

Maurice And Maralyn is out 29th February 2024 and if you’d like to read my review you can find it on my blog.

Do you like real life survival stories? Which ones have you read?

Maurice And Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst

What begins as an eccentric English love story turns into one of the most dramatic adventures ever recorded…

Maurice and Maralyn couldn’t be more different. He is as cautious and awkward as she is charismatic and forceful. It seems an unlikely romance, but it works.

Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England — and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation — forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

On their tiny raft, over the course of days, then months, their love is put to the test. When Maurice begins to withdraw into himself, it falls upon Maralyn to keep them both alive. Their pet turtle helps, as does devising menus for fantasy dinners and dreaming of their next voyage.

Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive — not just at sea, but in life.

The Wager by David Grann

On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
 
Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.