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Sea Wife
“Where does a mistake begin?” So begins Amity Gaige’s literary thriller, inspired by a real-life 2014 Coast Guard rescue. Michael and Juliet, facing an ailing marriage and midlife malaise, decided to sell all their worldly possessions and spend a year sailing around the Caribbean. But now Juliet is home, Michael is absent, and we don’t know why—but it’s clear everything changed on the yacht. In dual narratives, we see Juliet struggling mightily to cope with her current life in the suburbs, and—thanks to her early discovery of Michael’s captains log from the voyage—we get Michael’s real-time, emotional account of their harrowing times on the open seas, and the unbearable stress it placed on their already-crumbling relationship. A harrowing portrait of a boat in peril and a marriage in crisis.
About the Book
“Sea Wife is a gripping tale of survival at sea—but that’s just the beginning. Amity Gaige also manages, before she’s done, to probe the underpinnings of romantic love, marriage, literary ambition, political inclinations in the Trump age, parenthood, and finally, the nature of survival itself in our broken world. Gaige is thrillingly talented, and her novel enchants.”
—Jennifer Egan
“Sea Wife brilliantly breathes life not only into the perils of living at sea, but also into the fraught and hidden dangers of domesticity, motherhood, and marriage. What a smart, swift, and thrilling novel.”
—Lauren Groff
From the highly acclaimed author of Schroder, a smart, sophisticated page literary page-turner about a young family who escape suburbia for a yearlong sailing trip that upends all of their lives.
Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her stalled-out dissertation on confessional poetry when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. With their two kids—Sybil, age seven, and George, age two—Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four foot sailboat awaits them.
The initial result is transformative; the marriage is given a gust of energy, Juliet emerges from her depression, and the children quickly embrace the joys of being feral children at sea. Despite the stresses of being novice sailors, the family learns to crew the boat together on the ever-changing sea. The vast horizons and isolated islands offer Juliet and Michael reprieve – until they are tested by the unforeseen.
Sea Wife is told in gripping dual perspectives: Juliet’s first person narration, after the journey, as she struggles to come to terms with the life-changing events that unfolded at sea, and Michael’s captain’s log, which provides a riveting, slow-motion account of these same inexorable events, a dialogue that reveals the fault lines created by personal history and political divisions.
Sea Wife is a transporting novel about marriage, family and love in a time of unprecedented turmoil. It is unforgettable in its power and astonishingly perceptive in its portrayal of optimism, disillusionment, and survival.
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