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."
