I had not read anything by Michael Crummey before, which is a shame, and now I’m hooked. The Wreckage starts with the trials and tribulations of a small village on Fogo Island. Sadie Parsons, the eldest daughter of a local Protestant family, finds herself falling in love with a Catholic boy named Wish, who has come across from St. John’s to run the movie projector. Local prejudice stands in the way, along with the fist of Sadie’s older brother.
Wish flees the Cove and follows the line of young men enlisting in the war. The Second World War is still in its early days, and Newfoundlanders (remember they were not yet part of Canada) were enlisting with the British army.
The story follows Wish from St. John’s to Nagasaki, where he suffers the brutality of a Japanese POW camp’s leader and barely survives the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the meantime, Sadie follows Wish from Fogo to St. John’s, but that’s where she stays, waiting for Wish’s war to end and finding her own sense of community among her new neighbours.
Sadie’s commitment to Wish is part blind faith and part blind stubbornness. I won’t spoil the story for you but the intertwining of these two stories is lovely and complicated. She drives the show!
Check out more about Michael Crummey on the Penguin Random House site.