From The Wreckage

Having achieved considerable success with his first novel, River Thieves, Michael Crummey has written a book that is equally stunning and compelling. The Wreckage is a truly epic, yet twisted, romance that unfolds over decades and continents. It engages readers on the austere shores of Newfoundland’s fishing villages and drags them across to Japanese POW camps during some of the worst events of the Second World War. Haunting, lyrical, and deeply intimate, Crummey’s language fully exposes his characters’ vulnerabilities as they struggle to come to terms with their guilt and regret over decisions made during their impulsive youths. It is a testament to Crummey’s gifts as a novelist that he can flow quite easily through time, across landscapes, and between vastly different characters. He vividly captures the mental and physical anguish experienced in prison camps, and with calm lucidity explores the motives of a Japanese soldier whose actions seem inhumanly cold and calculating. Crummey toys with the readers’ sympathies, suggesting there are few distinctions between the enemy and us. He incorporates heartbreaking tragedy–the dropping of the atom bomb, lynchings in America, murderous revenge–to underscore the darker side of humanity. Crummey shows that we are capable of violence, but in the end he proves we are also capable of redemption, forgiveness, and can be led, unashamed, back to the ones we love.

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.

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 thrilling new route to a better society A toxic ideology of extreme competition and individualism has come to dominate our world. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better future. George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a “politics of belonging.” Both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganized from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society. Urgent and passionate, Out of the Wreckage provides the hope and clarity required to change the world.

"In a matter of minutes on a Friday night, I lost my school, my identity, the security of my first love, the personality of my sweet fearless brother, my best friend, my town, everything as I knew it. Everything changed." "Minutes - that's all it takes to change your entire life. How do you deal with that?" For high school senior Jules Blacklin surviving the storm is only the beginning. Faced with the new reality of her life, she must find a way to rise From The Wreckage and answer the question - how do you get back to normal, when everything that was normal is gone?

Gwynne Dyer is cheering up. Sure, the past decade has had more than its share of stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism, and lies, lies, lies. But signs of progress actually do abound. While the world is far from perfect as we embark on a fresh decade, Dyer believes that the “sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone.” When things go wrong it’s always easy to pin blame—but singling out the forces that lead to positive change can be trickier. In this illuminating collection of columns from the last five years, Gwynne Dyer ferrets out the signs of hope—without overlooking the issues that remain seemingly intractable. Mining the events of recent history, Dyer contextualizes the recent past and anticipates what the future might have in store. This journalist’s beat is global: from Africa to South America, from Europe to the Middle East, and any other region with a political pulse. Acerbic and iconoclastic, Dyer has never been afraid to call ’em like he sees ’em—and we are all the better for his trademark candour and the breadth of his knowledge and expertise. For anyone seeking to understand the larger forces that shape our society and our world, Crawling from the Wreckage makes for necessary reading.

Top selling poet Sarah Kay releases her debut collection of work from the first decade of her career. Following the success of her breakout poem, "B," No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's skill for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"). Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. - 2011 TED speaker (recording has been viewed 3 million times online) - First book, "B" was ranked #1 Bestselling Poetry Book on Amazon - Featured on HBO, American Public Radio, Huffington Post, CNN.com, etc. - Founder and Co-Director of Project VOICE

One fatal crash. Two colliding worlds. Three wrecked lives. Ben is driving on the motorway, on his usual commute to the school where he works. A day like any other... Except for one man who, in a final despairing act, jumps in front of Ben's car, turning the teacher's world upside down in a single horrifying instant... Wracked with guilt and desperate to clear his conscience, he develops a friendship with Alice, the dead man's wife, and her 7-year-old son Max. But as he tries to escape the trauma of the wreckage, could he go too far in trying to make amends? How would you cope, knowing you'd caused someone's death? And are the dynamics of this friendship exactly what they seem?