Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The Mystery of Right and Wrong is a masterwork from one of the countrys 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 hes kept for more than thirty years
Wade Jacksona young man from a Newfoundland outport wants to be a writer In the university library in St Johns where he goes every day to absorb the great books of the world he encounters the fascinating South Africanborn Rachel van Hout and soon they are lovers
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
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 beyondan obsession that has deeper and more disturbing roots than Wade could ever have imagined
Confronting the central mystery of his character Rachels lifeand his ownWayne Johnston has created a tourdeforce that pulls the reader toward a conclusion both inevitable and impossible to foresee As he writes The 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 lighta lot of lighton things that once illuminated lose their power to distort the truth
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