The Mystery of Right and Wrong

Wayne Johnston

sept 2021 · Distribuido por Knopf Canada

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The Mystery of Right and Wrong is a masterwork from one of the country’s 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 he’s 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. John’s, 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.

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 beyond—an obsession that has deeper and more disturbing roots than Wade could ever have imagined.

Confronting the central mystery of his character Rachel’s life—and his own—Wayne Johnston has created a tour-de-force 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 light—a lot of light—on things that, once illuminated, lose their power to distort the truth.”

Acerca del autor

WAYNE JOHNSTON was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting, and his gift for both description and character, his #1 nationally bestselling novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was just 26 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen 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. A theatrical adaptation of the novel recently toured Canada. Johnston's most recent novel, First Snow, Last Light, was a national bestseller and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.