{"product_id":"the-mystery-of-right-and-wrong-isbn-9780735281639","title":"The Mystery of Right and Wrong","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Mystery of Right and Wrong\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWade 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eRachel 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWade 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Diary of Anne Frank\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eConfronting 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, “\u003ci\u003eThe Mystery of Right and Wrong\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003ePRAISE FOR \u003ci\u003eTHE MYSTERY OF RIGHT AND WRONG\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Mystery of Right and Wrong\u003c\/i\u003e is among the most disturbing books I have ever read. With the intensity of a thriller, the intimacy of a diary, Wayne Johnston maps the warped world that people create for themselves, then force others to live within. It twists history and herstory, fiction and fact, into a dark fairy tale, an epic poem, a case study of pathology, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Johnston shows us how hard it is to escape our family’s reach and how easily our coping mechanisms can become prisons of their own. An absolutely unforgettable novel. As morally and formally challenging as Nabokov. I’m still reeling.” \u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eIan Williams, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eReproduction\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Mystery of Right and Wrong\u003c\/i\u003e is unyieldingly intense, a harrowing portrait of a family mired in madness, dark secrets and the long-term impact of sexual abuse that will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.” —\u003ci\u003eCalgary Herald\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don't expect to read, this year, anything more disturbing, more powerful, more brave, or more amazingly written than this latest from Wayne Johnston. You have to wonder how he kept this one inside him all this time.” —\u003cb\u003eLinwood Barclay\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePRAISE FOR WAYNE JOHNSTON\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If St. John’s looms large in the Canadian literary psyche, this is due in no small measure to the novels of Wayne Johnston, a native of Newfoundland’s capital city and one of its most diligent chroniclers.” —\u003ci\u003eQuill \u0026amp; Quire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Johnston is] a literary giant who has god-given talent.”\u003ci\u003e —\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eWill Ferguson\u003c\/b\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wayne Johnston spins wonderful stories; he is a gather-you-round-and-I-will-enchant-you raconteur. He has absorbed the world around him—the tall tales, the history, the epic of a place—and adapted it to a narrative style that is clearly his own. His stories charm and beguile. He writes about the ordinary and extraordinary people of Newfoundland with great empathy and without a shred of sentimentality. At the same time his fiction has a mythic quality: Smallwood walking across the island through drifted snow; a father and son surviving a long trek through winter woods by holding onto a horse and one another; an iceberg with the likeness of the Virgin Mary. Wayne Johnston’s fiction is subtle, his passion understated, his humour underpinned by tragedy. All of his work, superbly written, is a powerful combination of insight, talent and revelation. It is made to endure.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003cb\u003eWriters’ Trust Engel\/Findley Award jury citation\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e(David Bergen, Joan Clark and Miriam Toews)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 \u003ci\u003eThe Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Colony of Unrequited Dreams.\u003c\/i\u003e His first book, \u003ci\u003eThe Story of Bobby O'Malley\u003c\/i\u003e, published when he was just 26 years old, won the WH Smith\/Books in Canada First Novel Award. \u003ci\u003eBaltimore's Mansion\u003c\/i\u003e, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. \u003ci\u003eThe Colony of Unrequited Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eFirst Snow, Last Light,\u003c\/i\u003e was a national bestseller and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin prize.","brand":"Knopf Canada","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302485774565,"sku":"NP9780735281639","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780735281639_cc441e92-743c-48c9-a72e-28923c680129.jpg?v=1742927734","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-mystery-of-right-and-wrong-isbn-9780735281639","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}