Crossing: A True Story - by Glyn Vincent (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In early Spring of 2022, the author boarded a 52-foot sailboat to cross the Atlantic with a close friend and a captain and sailor he did not know.

From the start of the 2,600-mile trip, from St. Martin in the Caribbean to the Azores off Portugal, things went awry--with the captain, the boat, the weather and, most precipitously, the author's state of mind. As a recreational sailor with no experience of being out of sight of land, the author's darkest fears materialized as the small crew sailed through squalls then gales and, finally, a tropical storm with near-hurricane force winds.

In Crossing, Glyn Vincent explores why he ventured into the middle of the ocean in the first place, and how he first fell in love with the sea. He describes his unsettled childhood in New York City, his parents' tabloid existence (his mother was the Broadway and television actress Betsy von Furstenberg) and the itinerant, unstable lives of his grandparents and great-grandparents, whose troubled history goes back on his mother's side to a Gothic castle in Germany and on his father's side to an orphanage in Alexandria, Egypt, and a massacre in Damascus in 1860.

In the end, this enthralling memoir is as much about the storm Vincent inherited and harbored within, as it is about the one he encountered at sea.

Review Quotes

"[An] honest, page-turning account of a full-on, big ocean passage, the magic and tension of Crossing is its lovely, patient prose and the all-in confrontation it forces between shipmates and skippers, fathers and sons, dreams and reality, mystery and understanding --and the soul-settling manhood this Telemachus finally earns as captain of his own fate."--David Michaelis, author of Eleanor

Glyn Vincent's Crossing takes its place by Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach as a contemporary reckoning with personal history in the form of a white-knuckled sailing voyage. A son in search of the truth about his slippery father in an unsteady history that veers from Algeria to New York, to Paris, and back again, this conflicted and brutally honest story had me from start to finish. --Rebecca Chace, New York Times Notable author of Leaving Rock Harbor

"In Crossing, a gifted diarist takes on the challenge of that familiar dictum, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Vincent marries the absorbing tale of his first Transatlantic voyage under sail with the sometimes heart-wrenching history of his unconventional family, the end result an unflinchingly honest gem of a book."--Pete Bodo, award-winning sportswriter, former outdoors columnist for The New York Times, author or co-author of eight books, including A Champion's Mind and Courts of Babylon.

About the Author

Glyn Vincent is a journalist and the author of The Unknown Night, a biography of the American artist R.A. Blakelock. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, his articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, The Paris Review, Columbia Magazine, The Huffington Post and many other publications. He was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard and Columbia University School of Journalism. A keen outdoorsman, Vincent is actively involved with local environmental organizations on Long Island, where he also saltwater fly-fishes and sails.