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.
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
National Bestseller
Nominee, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
“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
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
