How did we survive such impossible grief and rage?
Like Room, this is a thrilling domestic psychodrama that draws its power from quotidian detail as well as gothic horror, as a woman and a child at close quarters must draw on inner resources to survive an impossible situation.
When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible.
About the book: Told through the voice of five-year-old Jack, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.
The acrobats survive near-impossible stunts that make the audience gasp.
But the achievement brought Johnny nothing but existential disenchantment (surviving the impossible climb, he said to a friend, only meant that "nature wasn't as raw as everybody wanted to believe"), and, two years later, fresh out of a mental hospital, he wandered alone up avalanche-ridden Mount Denali, never to be seen again.
How much of the once 2km-wide hunk of dirty ice could have survived is impossible to say.
At least 45,000 marsh Arabs remain, fighting against the odds to grow food and survive in almost impossible conditions.
The deal is simple, if the prisoner can survive the near-impossible..
The Martian by Andy Weir Stuck on Mars after a space mission gone awry, astronaut Mark Watney makes a desperate bid to survive despite near-impossible odds.
