Sophie Elmhirst reconstructs the remarkable story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple who in 1972 abandoned ordinary life to sail across the world. Four months into their voyage, a whale struck and sank their boat. They spent 117 days adrift in a tiny inflatable raft, surviving on rainwater, raw fish, and sea turtles. Elmhirst, a journalist, tells their survival story with novelistic attention to physical and psychological detail. But the book's deeper subject is marriage itself: what happens when two people are stripped of everything except each other. The Baileys' relationship, which had seemed solid on shore, was tested in ways that revealed both its strengths and its fault lines. They cooperated heroically to survive, then struggled for years afterward to process what they had endured. Elmhirst conducted extensive interviews with Maralyn (Maurice died in 2003) and drew on the couple's own writings. The result is a meditation on love, endurance, and the aftermath of trauma. The survival narrative is gripping, but the more complex story is what came after: how does a marriage continue after its two participants have seen each other at the limits of human capacity?