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The mystery of right and wrong / Wayne Johnston.
In a novel that grapples with sexual abuse, male violence and madness, Wayne Johnston reveals haunting family secrets he's kept for more than 30 years. Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, NL. From the author of First snow, last light and The colony of unrequited dreams, which was nominated for 16 national and international awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780735281639 (hardcover)
- Physical Description: 560 pages ; 24 cm
- Publisher: [Toronto, Ontario] : Alfred A. Knopf Canada, [2021]
- Copyright: ©2021
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Sisters > Fiction. Family secrets > Fiction. |
| Genre: | Domestic fiction. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at Tsuga Consortium.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lakeshore Branch | FIC Johns | 31681010250785 | FICTION | Available | - |
- Random House, Inc.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The Mystery of Right and Wrong is a masterwork from one of the countryâs most critically acclaimed and beloved writers that is both compulsively readable and heartstopping in the vital truth it unfolds. In a novel that grapples with sexual abuse, male violence and madness, Wayne Johnston reveals haunting family secrets heâs kept for more than thirty years.
Wade Jackson, a young man from a Newfoundland outport, wants to be a writer. In the university library in St. Johnâs, where he goes every day to absorb the great books of the world, he encounters the fascinating, South African-born Rachel van Hout, and soon they are lovers.
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Rachel is the youngest of four van Hout daughters. Her father, Hans, lived in Amsterdam during the Second World War, and says he was in the Dutch resistance. When the war ended, he emigrated to South Africa, where he met his wife, Myra, had his daughters and worked as an accounting professor at the University of Cape Town. Something happened, though, that caused him to uproot his family and move them all, unhappily, to Newfoundland.
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Wade soon discovers that Rachel and her sisters are each in their own way a wounded soul. The oldest, Gloria, has a string of broken marriages behind her. Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaner dealer husband, Fritz, can lay his hands on. Bethany, the most sardonic of the sisters, is fighting a losing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads The Diary of Anne Frank obsessively, and diarizes her days in a secret language of her own invention, writing to the point of breakdown and beyondâan obsession that has deeper and more disturbing roots than Wade could ever have imagined.
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Confronting the central mystery of his character Rachelâs lifeâand his ownâWayne Johnston has created a tour-de-force that pulls the reader toward a conclusion both inevitable and impossible to foresee. As he writes, âThe Mystery of Right and Wrong is a memorialization of the lost, the missing women of the world, and of my world. I see it not as a dark book, but as one that sheds lightâa lot of lightâon things that, once illuminated, lose their power to distort the truth.â
