THE MYSTERY OF RIGHT AND WRONG

A literary masterpiece that cracks open secret atrocities as it charts the unraveling of one mythomaniacal family.

Rachel, a hyper graphic, hyper lexic South African expat who is obsessed with The Diary of Anne Frank , is the youngest of four van Hout daughters whose father Hans, a Dutch South African accounting professor , moved his family to Newfoundland to make a new start.
When Wade, a young writer, meets and falls in love with Rachel, he learns that nothing in the world of the van Houts is what it seems, and that Rachel's obsessions have deeper and more disturbing r oots than he could ever have imagined. Each of the four beautiful, dutiful daughters is, in her distinctive way, a wounded soul. The oldest, Gloria, is a hyper sexual exhibitionist (or is she?) who, by the age of 28, has been married five times.
Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaans drug pusher husband Fritz can lay his hands on. Sardonic and self deprecating Bethany, aka Deathany, is fighting a losing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads and writes obsessively, diarizing her d ays in a secret language of her own invention.
Set in Newfoundland, apartheid era South Africa, wartime Amsterdam, and two concentration camps, this is an intricately woven and propulsive novel that chronicles the unmasking of a mythomaniacal family and the sisters' fight for love and their very lives. Informed by real events, it is a real tour de force.

WAYNE JOHNSTON is celebrated internationally for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his master plotting, and his gift for both description and character.