{"product_id":"the-mystery-of-right-and-wrongbooks","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.”","brand":"Johnston, Wayne","offers":[{"title":"Hardback (Adult Fiction G-L)","offer_id":43769828180192,"sku":"","price":21.6,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0330\/3125\/8248\/products\/BNCImageAPI_e3b9094a-6cf4-4648-a82f-f25d4ed3a026.jpg?v=1672414095","url":"https:\/\/agricola-street-books.myshopify.com\/products\/the-mystery-of-right-and-wrongbooks","provider":"Agricola Street Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}