ABOUT
THE BOOK

At the onset of the Second World War, Wish Furey travels the coast of Newfoundland, screening hollywood films in churches and fishermen’s halls. In a remote Protestant outport the young Catholic begins an intense affair with Sadie Parsons, a recklessly independent sixteen- year-old. Driven from Cove by the disapproval of locals and the ruthless prejudice of Sadie’s mother, Wish enlists in the British Army and, after the fall of Saigon, suffers through the brutality and deprivation of a Japanese POW camp. Turning her back on her family and community, Sadie settles into wartime St. John’s to wait for him, until word reaches her that Wish is dead.

Fifty years later, Sadie returns home for the first time since leaving Newfoundland to marry an American officer who pursued her while he was stationed in St. John’s. Travelling with her daughter, she arrives to scatter her husband’s ashes and to face the past – a past that will come to meet her in a way that she never imagined.