"Stories like this make the return to reality difficult."
-5 star Goodreads review
One day something snaps inside Arthur Gibson, a burnt out forty year old manager tired by his rat race office life, and within one hour he sells everything he owns, flies to the sea, buys a sailboat and drives to the horizon, planning on never coming back.
Of course this noble attempt to set himself free goes terribly wrong as the corporate environment didn’t exactly prepare Arthur well for an off the grid sailor’s life. So however free and independent he now feels, soon his biggest problem is how to survive.
His escape becomes an international media sensation thanks to Alice Garbo, an ambitious journalist who makes Arthur and herself famous to boost her career. Millions admire his courage to ‘stick it to the man’, millions call him a coward. Soon, Alice toys with Arthur’s destiny as she pleases, moves him like a chess piece to make his story appealing to the audience. He becomes a wanted felon pursued by Interpol and so he finds himself almost dying on a boat he can’t drive, being chased by police for something he didn’t do and haunted by a media alter ego that has a life of its own. Arthur has bitten off more than he can chew.
The Idea:
Arthur’s Choice talks about taking a scary leap of faith when finding one’s personal fulfillment without conforming to where society tells you a true happiness is. In today’s fast paced, performance oriented first world, this book offers the answer to the question ‘what if I just said enough?’ The story is for those struggling to find meaning or joy in mundane unfulfilling jobs, those tired by the contemporary speed of life. Or those simply looking to read a good story about freedom and the sea.
Arthur is not an off the grid anarchist hippie with a big ideology, but an ordinary man who just got fed up. He escapes to the sea, the final frontier of freedom, where no rules apply. In a boat, the little sovereign universe where you set the pace, where you set the direction.
As he says: “Ordinary people suffer the most. They don't love their lives. They want more time, more freedom, a more fulfilling job... Working for someone else's greedy dream just to make a living is a necessary evil. But not everybody can have an awesome fulfilling job. Yes, it is great to be an architect, or a comedian, a designer... but somebody's gotta sit behind the supermarket counter. The bus does not drive itself either. And you don't build a house without hard manual labor. You don’t sell thousand of useless insurances without life sucking office work. And this is how the average people live. This is how I lived, doing product marketing. Eight or more hours a day, working my a*s off, even though the world would still keep turning even if we sold just half of what we're selling and spent the saved time with each other. Instead of searching for happiness somewhere else. In the never ending stress, you just got used to. That is why people love TV shows. Because for an hour, it takes them away from the life they don't want to be in. And it shows them this alternative reality. That's f***ed up. That's not how you are supposed to live. So I am now talking to all of you who feel that there is something wrong here. Now if you are comfortable and I mean really comfortable with your reality, that’s fine. You are right where you should be and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if there is the tiniest doubt, if the smallest part of you feels like you should be doing something else with your life, just go."
"Great book, it is 'Into The Wild' meets 'Fight Club'!"
-Goodreads review
"Stories like this make it hard to go back to one's life."
-Goodreads review
"Couldn't put it down!"
-Goodreads review
"This actually made me wanna buy a sailboat and sail off the grid 'till the end. Expected a good story, got life-changing inspiration."
-Goodreads review
"What is this nonsense?"
-Author's mom
