The Wreckage

Award-winning writer Michael Crummey's new novel is a haunting, intricately seductive tale of love and war, and the lives of two young people indelibly marked by both. The Wreckage is a compelling story of love crossed by the blindness of faith and fate, played out in the outports of Newfoundland, the POW camps of Japan, and the cities and small towns of mid-century America. At the onset of the Second World War, Wish Furey travels the coast of Newfoundland with a projector, screening Hollywood films in church and fishermen's halls. In a remote Protestant outport the young Catholic meets Sadie Parsons, a recklessly independent sixteen-year-old. The two fall into a brief but intense relationship before the disapproval of locals and the ruthless prejudice of Sadie's mother set in motion a series of events and miscommunications that drive Wish out of the Cove. Turning her back on her family and community, Sadie follows Wish to St. John's only to discover that he has enlisted in the British army and shipped out for the Pacific. She settles into the wartime city to wait for him, while Wish endures the brutality and deprivation of a Japanese POW camp on the outskirts of Nagasaki. Pursued by an American officer stationed in St. John's, Sadie remains faithful to Wish until word reaches her at the end of the war that he is dead. Broken by the news, she abandons Newfoundland to live in the United States. Fifty years later, Sadie returns home with her daughter to scatter her husband's ashes and to face the past -- a past that will come to meet her in a way she never imagined. Psychologically astute and closely observed, The Wreckage is a remarkable evocation of the circumscribed andelemental life of the tiny outports of pre-war Newfoundland, the relatively cosmopolitan glamour of wartime St. John's, and the excruciating physical and mental torments of a prisoner-of-war camp. Impeccably 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 fully knowing another or oneself.

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