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. Wish lands in southeast Asia and then in a Japanese POW camp, suffering torture under a particularly cruel guard known as the Interpreter. At home, 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. A sweeping novel of love crossed by the blindness of faith and fate; finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. source
Scene
“On Little Fogo Island in 1940, itinerant Catholic projectionist Wish Furey screens films and meets sixteen-year-old Mercedes (Sadie) Parsons in the audience — the encounter that triggers the rest of the novel. The publisher's jacket copy: 'On Little Fogo Island, he spots a desirable young woman in the audience and embarks on an unwavering mission to possess her.'”
Part One, opening — 1940 Newfoundland section
[editorial]Synthesised from Q&Q review and publisher jacket copy (Penguin Random House Canada / McNally Robinson) — source
Places
- Set atLittle Fogo Island↗
Crummey's 2005 novel opens in a Protestant fishing community on Little Fogo Island in 1940. Multiple sources (Q&Q review, publisher jacket copy at McNally Robinson and PRH Canada) independently identify Little Fogo Island as the precise setting of the Newfoundland storyline.
Quill & Quire review of The Wreckage (2005); cross-referenced with publisher jacket copy at https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780385660617/michael-crummey/wreckage — source
