The incredible lives of Marie Anne and Louis Payzant have formed the stuff of legends and sparked the literary imagination of a number of writers, Margaret Atwood among them.

Fleeing religious persecution in eighteenth-century France, Huguenots Marie Anne and Louis abandoned the haven of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, for a new life in Nova Scotia, only to be engulfed by the New World's own troubles: colonial hardship, French-English warfare, and threats from local natives. A Passion for Survival is the true account of Louis's tragic death and Marie Anne's remarkable fortitude -- a story so extraordinary, it reads like fiction.