Alone: Lost Overboard in the Indian Ocean

In this intense memoir, Archibald describes how in the middle of the night in 2013, he fell into the Indian Ocean while vomiting off the side of a boat he and his friends had chartered for a birthday surfing trip. For the next 28 hours he struggled to survive as he fought off a shark, jellyfish, and birds and struggled with his own fears and regrets. His friends discovered his disappearance eight hours after he fell overboard and launched a rescue effort that was hindered by bad weather and a lack of emergency resources in the area. Luckily, they happened on a group of Australians who also had hired a boat for their own surfing adventure; that boat’s captain, “a hostage to his past” who had saved himself from his own “demons,” saw it as his duty to find Archibald. The narrative approach can be disconcerting, however: Archibald writes in the first person as he describes his struggles in the water, then switches to third person when writing about himself from his friends’ and family’s perspectives (“Brett was notable, even admired, for his high-spirited misbehavior”). Nevertheless, this survival tale pairs action with emotion and feels ready-made for the big screen. (Nov.)