First, some swashbuckling. The journalist David Grann embarks on a multi-leg journey from New York to Florida to Santiago, an annoying combination of planes and customs and cars and ferries en route to Chiloé Island, a little strip off the coast of Chile. There, he meets the boat captain who has agreed to steer him hundreds of miles farther south, to Wager Island, a place where nobody lives.

Storms have rolled in. To Grann’s surprise, the captain’s vessel is much smaller than it appeared in the photos. The tiny crew needs to chop wood to keep it heated; they retrieve drinking water from nearby glaciers. Out at sea, the boat’s top-heaviness reveals itself. No combination of Dramamine and anti-nausea wristbands and behind-the-ear patches can save an uninitiated stomach against these waves near the bottom of the Earth.

As the boat undulates, Grann calms his mind by listening to an audio version of Moby-Dick. He’s doing anything he can to pass the time before finally reaching the island he’s been obsessing over for two years. Once ashore, he treks and trudges and bushwhacks, much like the cadre of 18th-century shipwrecked sailors he’s writing about. The goal of this journey is not to find anything per se, but to experience, firsthand, the nothingness that he already knew was there. Wager Island is desolate: no Indigenous tribes, no land animals that he can see, a little seaweed, some celery. Even with his long johns and gloves and wool hat and rubber boots, he’s overwhelmed by the uniquely bone-chilling cold. The wind whips off the ocean. This is the sort of place where if, God forbid, you find yourself stranded, you’d almost certainly starve. Or lose your mind. Men might turn to mutiny, or murder. Also, it’s very wet.

Grann unfurled this yarn to me over a decidedly unadventurous arugula salad outside a sunny SoHo café on a warm April day. And after all that, Grann added, “I don’t ever write about my own trip in the book. I didn’t feel like it fit.” That book, The Wager, about the chaotic aftermath of a British naval ship wrecking off Patagonia’s coast nearly 300 years ago, and the conflicting accounts of what happened to the crew, is Grann’s latest work of nonfiction. It will almost surely land on the New York Times best-seller list. That’s not because masses of American readers share an insatiable appetite for the seafaring sagas of yore. Rather, Grann is in that microscopic group of nonfiction authors whose name alone—as a signal of his particular flair for narrative history—has the power to sell books.

Grann is an excavator, a researcher, a storyteller, but he’s not necessarily a historian. He’s a reporter, but his work is notably cinematic, which is not to say that he leans on exaggeration—most of his sentences are sourced in the endnotes. In his two previous books, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, Grann used mountains of archival material to construct capers with tension and momentum. (For Z, he also trekked through the Amazon.) His work has received critical acclaim—Killers was a finalist for the National Book Award—and yet, to detractors, Grann’s work teeters on the edge of being too accessible, or Hollywoodified. Perhaps that’s because his storytelling is both propulsive and pleasurable in a ’90s dad-thriller sort of way. You can usually spot one of his titles for sale at the airport. They’re high on the shelf, with their cover displayed, Grann’s name in large-scale type, like James Patterson or Tom Clancy. But those authors write novels; Grann does something very different. Are his books just page-turners, or are they literature with a capital L? Can a piece of writing only be one or the other?

Grann’s (very cold) journey to southern Chile lasted three weeks. He also flew to the U.K. to leaf through reams of logbooks and journals that had been kept for centuries in the British Archives. “You wait a couple of hours, get a box; you bring the box out; they give you all these special instructions about how to open it,” he said. “You pull it out of the box and—I’m not kidding—a cloud of dust emerges.” His eyes widened and his nostrils flared as he acted out the mid-1700s particles billowing up into his face.

But even that excursion was just a small percentage of Grann’s undertaking with this project. The Wager took him five years to research, report, outline, write, and revise. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his home office north of New York City, trying to decipher unpublished sailor scribblings with a magnifying glass, looking, in his own words, “like a dork.” Most days he’d wake up, drink large amounts of coffee, read the newspaper, waste time on Twitter, then work at his desk until dinner. “My kids joke that I was preparing for social distancing my whole life,” he said. He’d read books on shipbuilding, learning facts such as how a typical man-of-war ship required 4,000 trees. He figured out how to make sense of old maritime symbols and abbreviations. He dutifully typed anything remotely interesting into a searchable database on his home computer. In time, he was ready to make detailed chapter outlines. Eventually, he was in a position to start writing. Five hundred words a day was a solid pace.

[Read: A civil war over semicolons]

“I have what I call the ‘God, no’ file,” he told me. That refers to the early drafts, in which he may flaunt all the research he’s done. He’d give a copy of each chapter in progress to his wife, who would inevitably reply with some version of the phrase “God, no” after reading yet another 5,000-word digression. “You tighten up, and you turn red-faced, and you defend it, and then you kind of sheepishly walk away. And then you look at it and you say, Oh, yeah, she’s right. I got to cut this way down.” The Wager is just 257 pages before notes and acknowledgements.

I told him that the above method reminded me of a quote from Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and The Big Short—perhaps the other best-known nonfiction writer in the United States. Lewis once referred to his writing process as “sweaty and inelegant,” revealing to an interviewer that he may try 20 drafts of each chapter. Grann raised his eyebrows over his rounded glasses and let out a nasally laugh. “What’s so interesting is, like, that’s the true artistry. Because if you read Michael Lewis, I would’ve thought—I don’t know Michael—I would have just thought he’s the most facile writer, because he writes with such a fluidity,” he said. “I will rewrite …” He trailed off in thought. “I mean, 20 drafts would be small for me for a chapter.”

Here’s an example of a finished Grann passage from The Wager:

And then the clouds blackened, blotting out the sun. The winds began to wail, and angry waves emerged from nowhere, exploding against the hulls. The ships’ prows, including the Centurion’s red-painted lion, plunged into the deep hollows, before rearing upward pleadingly toward the heavens. The sails convulsed and the ropes whipped and the hulls creaked as if they might splinter.

Or consider this nauseating description of a scurvy outbreak:

As the scourge invaded the sailors’ faces, some of them began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. Their bloodshot eyes bulged. Their teeth fell out, as did their hair. Their breath reeked of what one of Byron’s companions called an unwholesome stench, as if death had already come upon them. The cartilage that glued together their bodies seemed to be loosening.

It’s not exactly a fun beach read. Nor is it a doorstop history tome in the Walter Isaacson, final-word-on-the-subject mold. Grann’s style is enveloping, immersive. And yet, it’s markedly different from that of Robert Caro, another nonfiction titan, who once moved to Texas to better understand Lyndon B. Johnson. (Also, people don’t really flaunt their unread Grann books in their Zoom background, as they do with The Power Broker.)

Grann believes that, like his other books, The Wager is not just an adventure story or a murder mystery. He’s quick to note that this book contains grand themes, such as the dangers of imperialism, the collapse of belief in institutions, the war over truth. It’s also a tale of sedition.

“I’d be getting materials from archives, reading about this 18th-century story, and then I would come home and flip on the cable news or read the newspaper, and there’d be allegations of alternative facts and so-called fake news and disinformation and debates over what history books could be taught in school,” he said. “What was weird is I kind of wanted to write about what was happening in our country at that period, because it was the most dominant compelling story, and then I found some weird parable way to wrestle with that story with a completely different story set centuries earlier.”

I finished The Wager believing that it doubles as a meditation on persistence. At its core, Grann’s book is about that queasy feeling of doing the same torturous thing every day as a means of trying to reach some far-off goal or destination—themes that continuously arise in his work. This also makes it a perfect metaphor for writing.

I asked Grann about his success and how, in the second half of his life, he manages to stay motivated—to pick himself up after one book project and turn to the next one—and avoid the distractions of his success (Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are debuting their three-hour-plus film version of Killers at next month’s Cannes Film Festival and have already signed on to make The Wager). In other words, Grann could do anything he wants, or nothing at all—a rare luxury for a working writer.

“If you ask anyone who knows me, they would say I describe myself as a failure,” he told me. He let out a quick, if slightly nervous laugh. “I am a wildly insecure person who always feels like I’m not living up to that ideal story I’m always striving to do. And it motivates me. And I think that in itself—I never think about the other stuff. Even the movie stuff—you know, it’s great. I’m incredibly honored and flattered. And for two days, my kids think I’m really cool. And that means more to me than anything.”

A bit later, he admitted that, yes, he’s presently burned out, and has no idea what he wants to write next. “These projects do take a lot out of me. You spend five years reading these documents and trying to craft sentences and doubting yourself constantly along the way. Have I taken a wrong turn? … Is this going to be my Wager shipwreck? Am I going to ground on the island? You know, it takes a lot out of you. You finish a project and, honestly, you’re like, I can’t do that again.”

The theme of obsession runs through nearly all of his work. Grann doesn’t exactly lionize megalomaniacs, but he seems endlessly fascinated with how people get that way. In his catalog of driven-to-the-extreme characters is Henry Worsley, the subject of his 21,000-word New Yorker story, The White Darkness, later published as a bound book. Worsley set out to walk across Antarctica. It’s a sort of preoccupation that few can understand. Grann does—his own endeavors have taken a particular kind of doggedness that makes him willing to sacrifice a lot for the sake of getting the story.

[Read: How to make a bestselling book]

Reflecting on an earlier stage of his career, he described himself as a workaholic: “I had trouble, you know, pulling away.” He’s still not much of a sleeper. But he told me that he simply can’t work from 8 a.m. to midnight at a screen anymore, white-knuckling his way to the finish line of a project. “As I had a family, I grew to just cherish my family more than my work, to be perfectly frank,” he said.

He’s 57 and strikes a slightly resigned tone now, tired perhaps from following the Wager’s adventures. “Repetition is the most—I think, in many ways, the most important teacher. You just learn through experience and by doing. And you get better at things,” he said. “And yet, the more you do it, the more humble you become, recognizing how hard it is to find the truth, and to convey it and communicate it. You know, I’m very conscious of fallibility. I think I will be a happy person in retirement. I know there are people who are so restless; I’ll be very happy.” After a little prodding, though, he admits that he probably has two books left in him.