Girl. Boy. Sea. is a story about a young boy’s perilous journey of survival, cast adrift on the vast Atlantic Ocean with meagre food and water to live on. The story opens with a small crew of teenage boys and their captain as they set sail in training for a Youth Sail Challenge. But tragedy strikes suddenly when a wild and powerful squall forces all of the crew to abandon ship and take refuge on a life raft. All except one.

Fifteen-year-old Bill is left stranded on the sinking yacht. With mere minutes to spare, Bill acts on adrenaline and gathers together some essentials, tosses them into a small wooden tender and casts off alone onto a raging, tempestuous ocean that seems intent on swallowing him whole. Surviving the storm is merely the first challenge, for hunger, thirst and exposure bring torments of their own. As a reader, one may wonder whether magic, delirium brought on by exhaustion and extreme hardship, or fate is responsible for what happens next, but when Bill finds Aya clinging to a buoy, smelling of near death, his own survival story gets even more complicated.

This is a remarkable story about the stoicism of the human spirit and its tenacious capacity to survive, especially when there is someone else to fight for. Ultimately, this is a story about Bill and Aya, their fated meeting, and the remarkable power of storytelling to bridge connections between the most unlikely of companions.

Natalie Platten is the assistant manager and children’s book buyer at Readings Doncaster.