The Wreckage - Softcover

Crummey, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385660618 ISBN 13: 9780385660617

Publisher: ANCHOR CANADA, 2006

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of River Thieves comes a sweeping novel of love crossed by the blindness of faith and fate.

In a remote Newfoundland outpost at the onset of the Second World War, the young Catholic Wish Furey meets the passionate, independent sixteen-year-old Protestant Sadie Parsons. They begin an intense affair that is cut short as prejudice and mistrust drive Wish away, into the British Army and the war. At home in Newfoundland, Sadie turns her back on her family and moves to St. John's to wait for Wish--until she receives word that he is dead.

Fifty years later, Sadie returns to Newfoundland to scatter her American husband's ashes and to face her past--one that will come to meet her as she never imagined.

Masterfully crafted, The Wreckage is both compulsively readable and a penetrating study of the reach and limits of love, the depths of human hatred, and the ultimate impossibility of knowing another or oneself.

About this title

Review:

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
National Bestseller
Nominee, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005

"If there's a better Canadian novel published this year, I'll be amazed."
-- Robert Wiersema, Vancouver Sun

"Heroically human. . . . Crummey offers a journey of stimulating moral inquiry, one of his fiction's most admirable qualities."
--The Globe and Mail

"Extraordinary. . . . [Crummey] explores human nature, charting the moral choices of his characters without passing judgment. . . . [His] gift is to write with compassion, imbuing relationships with complexity and depth. He doesn't make anything simple - or simplistic. The Wreckage shows with profound insight that nothing's fair in love and war."
--National Post

"A tale of love and loss, fear and prejudice and hate. . . . Crummey has delved into the complexity of the 20th century, revealing some of the most destructive events, both in Newfoundland and the world. . . . As the images [he] so vividly conjures up return to the mind at the end of the novel, the subtleties of the story deepen even
further."
--Quill & Quire

"If there's a better Canadian novel published this year, I'll be surprised."
-- Robert Wiersema, The Vancouver Sun

Praise for River Thieves
"A remarkable achievement. . . . This is powerful writing."
--Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain

"This multi-faceted jewel of a book is probably the finest Canadian novel of the year."
--National Post

"Michael Crummey is a tremendously gifted writer."
--Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief

About the Author:

MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of a memoir, Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation, three books of poetry including Arguments with Gravity, winner of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry, and a book of short stories Flesh & Blood. His first novel, River Thieves, was a finalist for the 2001 Scotiabank Giller Prize; his second novel The Wreckage was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize; his third novel, Galore, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award; and his fourth novel, Sweetland, was a national bestseller and finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

About this edition

• Publisher: ANCHOR CANADA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0385660618
• ISBN 13: 9780385660617
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368