The best books to get lost at sea with

Moby-Dick embodies the allure of sea stories – the coinciding feelings of adventure, horror, and awe; the battles of man vs. nature; the dangerous journeys.

Ishmael is a perfect protagonist, an outsider drawn to the ocean, while Ahab is a fascinating embodiment of obsession and emotion. But Mr. Starbuck is the character who has influenced countless of my own – someone trying to do what is right while battling with his own demons and moral compass.

For me, there is no better setting than the sea to explore these themes. The crew of the Pequod are isolated from the world and their ship is a little microcosm of humanity, pitted against the elements and themselves. I find that such an engaging and timeless story.

Patrick O’Brian is the master of nautical fiction. I enjoyed every one of his Aubrey—Maturin series but this one shines out.

I believe that, in maritime fiction, the sea should be its own character, and this book brings to life every face of it. His intricate prose captures the daily life onboard Napoleonic-era ships in painstaking detail and throws the reader into a totally immersive world.

But mostly, I love how this book embodies the friendship between Jack and Stephen. Although they are such different characters, they have such a beautiful connection and when they are separated from their ship, they rely on each other to survive.

I love exploring the various relationships of men and women, in platonic, familial, and romantic senses. 

This non-fiction book about the mutiny on HMS Hermione was a massive inspiration behind Leeward which features a fictional mutiny in the Caribbean.

I read it after listening to a podcast featuring Angus Konstam and was instantly hooked. The historical events were shocking and brutal and had far-reaching political consequences at the time. Angus Konstam describes them so cinematically and with such intriguing historical detail that I absolutely devoured the book.

I became immersed in my own research and started imagining what it would have been like on those ships – both the Hermione and the Surprise which hunted her down. 

As well as the characters who populate nautical stories and the sea itself, ships have such a vivid voice.

This non-fiction book follows HMS Erebus from her early journey to Antarctica to her eventual disappearance in the Canadian Arctic. I have a small obsession with polar exploration and this book captures the drama, the terror, and the mystery of it.

Michael Palin’s sensitivity to the historical issues and the real figures is very moving, especially the moment when the primary documents stop and all that is left to tell these men’s tales is a note in a desolate cairn.

I want to also sneakily recommend AMC’s adaptation of Dan Simmons’s The Terror, a TV show based on these events, which has some of my favourite writing in any piece of media.

A lot of the fiction and non-fiction around the Age of Sail and the Georgian navy focuses on the officers and the larger battles, so this book, discussing the lives of ordinary sailors, is very refreshing.

I read it for research for my own writing and really enjoyed the excerpts from the letters and other documents of the diverse groups of men (and women) who sailed on the ships of the line.

There is an intimacy there of seeing how these various stories and lives played out against the backdrop of wider events and political issues. It is something I always bear in mind while writing my own (fictional) narratives.