Every couple has its everyday challenges. Whose turn is it to take out the trash? Who was the last person to shop for groceries? And: Who’s going to kill these baby turtles since we have nothing left to eat after that whale destroyed our boat, leaving us alone on this tiny raft in the Pacific Ocean for months on end? That’s one of the many questions that Maurice and Maralyn Bailey must ask as they ponder their fate in Sophie Elmhirst’s suspenseful and surprisingly tender and uplifting debut book, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead, July 8).
Few couples have ever been put to such a test. But it seems that Maurice and Maralyn were a perfect match from the get-go. Tired of their suburban lives in Derby, England—about as far as one can get from the ocean in Britain—the pair decided to find their bliss in New Zealand. And so in 1972 they set sail in a 31-foot boat, opting not to bring a transmitter that would have let them radio for help after the leviathan sank their vessel off the coast of Panama. Despite their grueling and grim circumstances, the Baileys stayed strong by helping each other, telling stories and playing cards and taking turns fishing. Just how devoted were they to spending time together in the face of danger? Not long after they got back to England, they took to the high seas again.
In her famous solo flights, Amelia Earhart also tempted fate, until she went missing over the Pacific in 1937. What’s less known about the legendary aviator, long a popular feminist figure, is the story of her love life. In The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon (Viking, July 15), Laurie Gwen Shapiro recounts how publishing magnate George P. Putnam, in the words of our reviewer, “became her wily manager, tireless publicist, and, in 1931, after repeated proposals, her husband.”
Countless love stories, of course, have never been told. Elizabeth Lovatt unearths some of them in Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line (Legacy Lit/Hachette, May 27), about an English phone service that, beginning in the 1970s, helped women who had questions about their relationships—and their attraction to other women. “Lovatt builds a chosen family from this archive, sorting through decades of phone logs to report their stories,” our reviewer writes. “Due to repression, much of lesbian history is hidden history, and Lovatt writes that she felt like ‘an amateur lesbian sleuth’ uncovering the queer past.”
There is, too, the love that one can feel for a beloved pet. In Ubac and Me: A Life of Love and Adventure With a French Mountain Dog (S&S/Summit Books, July 15), translated by Adriana Hunter, Cédric Sapin-Defour takes a philosophical approach to the affection he felt for the Bernese Mountain Dog of the book’s title. “When you love a different category of living thing with a shorter lifespan, logic dictates that the day will come when the newborn catches up with your age, exceeds it and dies,” he writes. “The fact remains that this happiness has an expiry date, try as you might to spend each day slowing your dog’s life or speeding up your own.”
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
