First Light publishes 15 September as Cole Brauer battles foil damage mid-race with Team Malizia in the Ocean Race Atlantic.
First Light is published by Convergent Books and comes out 15 September, 240 pages covering the 130 days Brauer spent alone at sea during the 2023 to 2024 Global Solo Challenge: mechanical failures, food poisoning, the Southern Ocean at its coldest, and the years of doubt she faced before anyone let her near a start line. Billie Jean King and Christie Brinkley both blurbed it.
The timing is right in the middle of the Ocean Race Atlantic, the new IMOCA class transatlantic sprint that started 1 September from New York and is racing roughly 3,000 nautical miles to Lorient. Brauer is co-skippering Malizia 4, Team Malizia's brand-new IMOCA launched in July, alongside Boris Herrmann, Justine Mettraux and Julien Villion. The boat shot into an early lead and has spent much of the race at the front of the fleet, through two separate mechanical scares – that involved a foil strike that tore a component from its mounting and an autopilot failure overnight that forced Brauer and Herrmann out of their bunks to hand-steer until it was fixed.
Brauer described the foil incident herself in a video update posted 6 September. "That was not great," she said. "Now it is fixed. Offshore fixed. Held together with chewing gum and string. But it is totally working." At the time, the fleet was roughly halfway across on day four of the race.
The solo record behind the memoir
Brauer finished second in the 2023 to 2024 Global Solo Challenge, the only woman in the fleet and the youngest sailor by nearly a decade, and became the first American woman to sail solo, nonstop and unassisted around the world. She set a new Class40 circumnavigation speed record in the process and picked up US Sailing's Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year for 2024. She joined Team Malizia as co-skipper in 2025, moving from a boat with no one else aboard to a cockpit built for four.
Whether First Light reaches shelves before or after Malizia 4 crosses the finish line in Lorient depends on how the next few days at sea go. Either way, the book gives her solo record a permanent home on the shelf.
