Books like Life of Pi

The short answer: look for survival stories that turn, at the end, into questions about what you choose to believe. The Old Man and the Sea, Robinson Crusoe, The Alchemist, Siddhartha, Martel's own The High Mountains of Portugal and, newer and more mythic, SalsSky: The Chosen One are the closest.

Life of Pi is a sea story and then something else. A boy named Pi, raised in a zoo in India and drawn to three religions at once, survives a shipwreck and spends 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. The voyage is told in vivid, practical detail: water, fish, fear, the daily negotiation with an animal that could kill him. Then, at the very end, he tells the investigators a second version of the story, and asks them which one they prefer.

That last turn is why the book stays with people. It is not only about surviving. It is about the stories we need in order to survive, and whether a story can be true in more than one way.

The sea stories

The Old Man and the Sea is the shortest and hardest: an old fisherman, a great fish, and what he refuses to give up even when he loses it. Robinson Crusoe is the original island survival story, slower and stranger than most people remember, and as much about a man's inner life as about building a shelter. Moby-Dick is the obsession version, enormous and digressive, for readers who want the sea to swallow them for a few weeks.

The belief stories

The Alchemist and Siddhartha share Pi's spiritual curiosity, the sense that the world is full of signs and that a journey is also a search. The High Mountains of Portugal, Martel's later novel, returns to grief, faith and an animal companion in three linked stories.

Where SalsSky fits

SalsSky: The Chosen One is a finished mythic novel in seven chapters, set long before history in a harbour city called San Juan. Its hero, Sals, is a sea master, and the turning point of the first chapter is the sea itself: in the scene called The Surge, the water comes, and a man goes back into it for his life's work. What the book asks afterwards is very close to Pi's question, which story do you hold onto when everything is gone, and one of its lines answers it in Sals's own way:

“They drown because they can’t let go of what’s already gone.”

Honestly, SalsSky is not a survival story in Pi's sense. It is a mythic novel with a whole city, a teacher, creatures and a long journey that follows the sea, and it is new and little known. If Life of Pi made you want a story that is also about how you live, you can read Chapter One free on salssky.com, about five minutes a scene.

Reading for the second story

The best way to read any of these is to notice when the book stops being about the boat and starts being about you. Pi's tiger, Santiago's fish, Sals's sea: each is real in the story and also something you carry. Ask what yours is.

A question to carry

If you had to tell the hardest year of your life as a story, which version would you choose to believe?