The Wreckage by Michael Crummey

At the onset of the Second World War, Wish Furey travels the coast of Newfoundland, screening hollywood films in churches and fishermen's halls. In a remote Protestant outport the young Catholic begins an intense affair with Sadie Parsons, a recklessly independent sixteen- year-old. Driven from Cove by the disapproval of locals and the ruthless prejudice of Sadie's mother, Wish enlists in the British Army and, after the fall of Saigon, suffers through the brutality and deprivation of a Japanese POW camp. Turning her back on her family and community, Sadie settles into wartime St. John's to wait for him, until word reaches her that Wish is dead.

Fifty years later, Sadie returns home for the first time since leaving Newfoundland to marry an American officer who pursued her while he was stationed in St. John's. Travelling with her daughter, she arrives to scatter her husband's ashes and to face the past - a past that will come to meet her in a way that 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.

Michael Crummey is the author of a memoir, Newfoundland: Journey into a lost Nation, three books of poetry, and a book of short stories, Flesh and Blood. His first novel, River Thieves, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 2001 Giller Prize. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.