Westerly Sun Column | Stories of Survival Can Captivate the Imagination

I was at home sick the other week, and ended up binge-watching the reality survival series “Alone.” It was enthralling, not because I’m some outdoorsy survivalist (quite the opposite, in fact), but for the same reason that I was captivated by Gary Paulson’s “Hatchet” when I was young: because it's fascinating to see people do something that I could never in a million years do. These contestants are out there hunting bear and engaging in bushcraft for months on end, whereas I’d likely choke on a poisonous berry an hour in. Tales of survival are incredibly popular among people of all ages, and there are innumerable books and movies on the subject at the library.

While “Alone” takes place on land, I’ve read a fair number of books focusing on survival on the water. Most recently was “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck” (2025) by Sophie Elmhirst. The book tells the story of Maurice and Maralyn, a young couple who spent 118 on a tiny raft in the Pacific Ocean after a whale sank their boat. Even crazier is “438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea” (2015) by Jonathan Franklin, which recounts José Salvador Alvarenga’s unbelievable 14 months adrift on a fishing boat.

A similar subsection of survival books is that of shipwrecks. One of the most famous is the story of “Endurance”, the sailing ship captained by Sir Ernest Shackleton, which voyaged to Antarctic in 1914 and was trapped in ice. The ship perished, but, remarkably, the entire crew survived until they were rescued in August of 1916.  Another great book is Joan Druett’s “Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World”, which is as much about human nature as it is about survival. Druett tells the tale of two ships that were wrecked on opposite ends of the Auckland Islands in 1864, and how one crew was able to band together and ultimately escape, while the other turned to infighting, murder, and cannibalism. 

Many of the books I have enjoyed are nonfiction that read like novels, but there are also plenty of fictional survival stories. “Isola” by Allegra Goodman is one I enjoyed that is actually based on the true story of Marguerite de La Rocque, a 16th-century French noblewoman who was abandoned on a small island by her cousin and guardian, after falling in love with his clerk. If all else fails, you can always reread a classic like “Hatchet”, or simply lose yourself in the latest season of Survivor!

by Cassie Skobrak, Adult Services Librarian