“Scary, Stunning and Sublime.” Kathleen Rooney Recommends Nine Great Books About Survival at Sea

You guys, the sea is huge and scary, stunning and sublime. No matter how many times I think about its vastness, my brain falls short of comprehension. Growing up in the Midwest on the shores of the beautiful but way less threatening Great Lake Michigan, I didn’t swim in any ocean until I was 19 years old. When I finally did, off the coast of Costa Rica on a spring break trip in 1999, I had the first and most intense panic attack of my life. My abiding fear and awe of the ocean are a large part of why I wanted to write Man Overboard!, a novel about a 33-year-old Nebraska man named Kick Kilpatrick, physical therapist by day, gym bro by side hustle, who falls (or jumps?) off a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico while on a Thanksgiving vacation with his extended family, then has to spend the next several hours desperately treading water and hoping for rescue. It’s a comedy!

Like me, Kick is an enormous fan of survival stories of all kinds, having grown up consuming Reader’s Digest’s Drama in Real Life feature, obsessing over narratives of people getting mauled by bears and dragging themselves to safety or digging themselves out from backcountry avalanches. But the ones that most haunted me, and therefore haunt Kick, are the accounts of people lost at sea, struggling to be found. Researching this novel, I read and reread a lot of literature about that sort of plight, finding these to be some of the very best.

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Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Okay, okay, everybody knows this one is great, yet it still manages to be misunderstood and underrated. It took me three tries over a span of many years before I was able to lock in with this novel, but it was worth the repeated effort. In high school, I started it and could tell it was amazing, but didn’t connect; same in grad school. In 2019 on the occasion of Melville’s 200th birthday, the Newberry Library here in Chicago hosted a 25-hour marathon live reading of the book, a Dick-a-Thon, if you will, and invited local authors to participate. Moby-Dick is my spouse’s, the writer Martin Seay’s, favorite novel of all time, so naturally he wanted to join. So did I, but it felt wrong to do so if I hadn’t read the whole behemoth. That January I devoured the story over the course of 10 days and it remains a peak reading experience of my existence. Like Moby himself rising from the deep, the book crushed me:

“Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterrous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot length-wise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.”

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Although tragically the gentleman of the title is (spoiler alert!) never rescued from his fall into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and Panama, Brad Bigelow and Boiler House Press have rescued Herbert Clyde Lewis’s slim, existential story from out-of-print obscurity. The brilliance of this 168-page book lies partly in its omniscience, giving us not only the inner workings of Henry Preston Standish, the titular gentleman, but also those of his fellows, including the seaman Bjorgstrom whose perspective on the deep here captures the Wodehouse-meets-Sartre charm of Lewis’s writing:

“Once Bjorgstrom had sailed on an American passenger ship plying between New York and Havana, but he quit after one voyage, even though he badly needed the job. Those frivolous people with their cocktails and their dancing in the moonlight, they had no respect at all for the sea. They thought God made the sea to entertain them, while every sensible sailor knew God made it to transport merchandise quietly from one continent to another. As a result the sea got angry and reminded them of their arrogance every once in a while, burning them in a fire aboard ship, freezing them in a northwester, or beating their brains out against mile-high waves. And it was so funny how easily the sea put them in their places, easier than an elephant stepping on an ant. That was why Bjorgstrom thought hazily, sailors did not wash more than they had to. Landlubbers who did not understand the sea imagined it was because sailors were naturally dirty, but it was only because they did not wish to get too much of the sea on them.”

In Hazard by Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes’s 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica, about a group of children captured by pirates, is one of my most beloved books about kids that’s intended for adult readers. My favorite of his books from a purely survival-at-sea standpoint, though, is his 1938 novel In Hazard. Based on the true story of a merchant steamship sucked into a hurricane, here Hughes chronicles what it would feel like to spend four days on a small vessel fighting for your life. Scary and claustrophobic, the novel conveys the terror that such an ordeal would produce: “There was a smell of stale sea, stale food, and stale air; but there was another smell too: bitter, ammoniac. It was quite faint, but the captain knew it. You do not forget it, if you have ever smelt it. It was the smell of fear. Disciplined men can control their muscles, even their facial expressions. But they cannot control the chemistry of their sweat glands.”

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Before she was a biologist, Rachel Carson was a poet, and this book shows it. Although this middle volume of what would become her Sea Trilogy is not strictly about survival at sea in the way that most of these books are, its expansive, scientific, and lyrical approach to ecological writing argues that really we are all of us at sea on this ocean-covered planet, and our survival as a species depends on the health and well-being of our many oceans and the creatures who dwell within it.

I mean: “The tragedy of the oceanic islands lies in the uniqueness, the irreplaceability of the species they have developed by the slow processes of the ages. In a reasonable world men would have treated these islands as precious possessions, as natural museums filled with beautiful and curious works of creation, valuable beyond price because nowhere in the world are they duplicated. W.H. Hudson’s lament for the birds of the Argentine pampas might even more truly have been spoke of the islands: ‘The beautiful has vanished and returns not.'”

Other Shores by Diana Nyad

Both Kick and I hold Diana Nyad as a kind of problematic fave. On the one hand, this out and outspoken lesbian long-distance swimmer has done some impressive and admirable aquatic feats. On the other, she also cheats and lies about her opponents. Find a Way, the memoir she published after her alleged 2013 Cuba-to-Florida swim at the age of 64 (it was denied ratification by the World Open Water Swimming Association due to lack of evidence and potential improper help from her crew), is better known. But I prefer this earlier memoir, less dressed up in motivational speaker cliches. Nyad is full of braggadocio and self-aggrandizement, but I love how she captures the physical demands and mental trippiness of being a body in the water for hours upon end:

“To me, the long swims have become hypnotic sessions, deprivation tank experiences, LSD trips. My memory delves back into my childhood, to even as early as two years old, to sift through events and reinterpret dialogue that I couldn’t possibly remember when ‘conscious.’ My imagination flowers to the point that I am wonderfully entertained by the scenes I paint on my eyelids and I am sincerely frightened by the horrors I imagine myself to be confronting.”

Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone

Everybody read this thriller so we can all talk about it. Cool, dry, sexy, and philosophical, it tells the story of ex-Navy Vietnam War veteran Owen Browne’s courageous yet foolish attempt to win a highly publicized race by sailing solo around the world. It’s like if Joan Didion wrote manly adventure stories. Robert Stone said he based this, his fifth novel, loosely on the real-life businessman and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst, but the genius of his fictional approach lies not only in the character of Browne, but also in those of Browne’s ambitious wife Anne and of Ron Strickland, the sleazy countercultural documentarian that Browne’s boat-manufacturer employer hires to make a film about the feat.

Dread hangs over this book like fog over the sea. In the end, the story is as much about how, if at all, a person can make meaning in a meaningless world as it is about trying not to drown: “Carefully, he examined his imagined positions on the chart. All the stories were embroidered, so it was said. Sailors privately ridiculed each other’s accounts. No one had ever brought the truth ashore. It was not to be had.”

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whale Ship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick gave the keynote at the aforementioned Newberry Library Moby-Dick event, and it was fabulous. He was invited, of course, because of this book about the 240-ton Essex that set sail from Nantucket in 1820 only to be rammed and sunk in the South Pacific a year and a half later by an 80-ton sperm whale, the inspiration for Melville’s novel.

The story of the specific New England sailors who went through this journey, 90 days starving and dehydrated on the open ocean, would be worth the read unto itself. But Philbrick also includes facts and meditations on what it takes to survive such extremity, including this passage, which was invaluable in imagining what Kick would be going through: “Success in a long-term survival situation requires that a person display an ‘active-passive’ approach to the gradual and agonizing unfolding of events. ‘The key factor…[is] the realization that passivity is itself a deliberate and ‘active’ act,’ the survival psychologist John Leach writes. ‘There is strength in passivity’.”

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Like Carson’s book above, this is not a survival-at-sea story in the traditional sense, but also like Carson’s book, it uses the ocean to explore the deeper connections of the past to the present and how events on one part of the planet impact us all. Blending folklore and Afrofuturism, Rivers Solomon’s speculative novella tells of an underwater civilization created by the wajinru, descendants of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard into the Atlantic. The protagonist Yetu serves as this society’s historian, recalling past traumas on behalf of everyone, a task that proves destructive to the point that she escapes to the surface to grapple with the world her people left behind and whether or not she can continue to shoulder her burden.

Rivers writes poetically of the profound questions books about the depths can access: “One can only go for so long without asking ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I come from?’, ‘what does all this mean?’, ‘what is being?’, ‘what came before me and what might come after?’. Without answers there is only a hole. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.”

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst

This one came out too late for me to use as research, per se, but I like to keep up on my survival-at-sea stories. It caught my eye when Barack Obama put it on his Favorite Books of 2025 List. (Remember when we had a president who liked to read? That was neat.) Journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the story of Maurice and Marilyn Bailey, a married couple who set sail for a life at sea in 1972 and have a pretty good time upon the bounding main until a sperm whale (can’t blame these guys for holding a grudge against us, I suppose, considering what we’re doing to the planet) plows a hole into their boat, causing it to sink in the Pacific. From there, the Baileys must fight to survive for months in a tiny raft.

As Blair Braverman puts it in her review: “Wilderness survival is tedious. Its tensions consist, in large part, of gradually lowered standards, as survivors cling as long as possible to the dignities of saying ‘not yet’: to killing weird animals; killing cute ones; eating raw or rotten meat; cannibalism. A survivor’s strength is twofold, lying both in acceptance of what must be done, and in a resistance to doing it.” This book illustrates that tension, nothing is happening but everything is happening, that makes survival-at-sea stories irresistible.

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Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney is available from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.