The Wreckers (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798889662006)

Boldly original, highly readable, and infinitely enjoyable--an audacious, swashbuckling entertaining epic that combines propulsive narrative drive with literary ambition--The Wreckers is richly layered, darkly comic, bursting with plot, and unforgettable characters.

Spanning four hundred years and multiple continents--from Cuba to Portugal to Angola during the chaos of the civil war--The Wreckers unfolds like a set of nesting dolls. It begins with a Last Will and Testament of Garoto Bárbaro de Castro, which reads like a novel in miniature and expands into a globe-trotting saga of pirates, con men, revolutionaries, poets, priests, ghouls, and ghosts.

Garoto Bárbaro de Castro is the son of a Portuguese slave trader who wears his father's teeth in brass dentures; he is the reader's introduction to the tall tales that follow. Mamzelle Guzman is a fearsome pirate and Garoto's doomed love. Commodore Lafitte is a Byron-esque narcissist obsessed with spectacle. Nuno Bárbaro de Castro, an artifact hunter and graverobber whose schemes entangle Felix Guzman, a reluctant descendant of de Castro and Mamzelle Guzman, trying--and failing--to escape history's grip.

The Wreckers tackles colonialism, power, the slave trade, inheritance, and revolution with intelligence and bite--while remaining compulsively readable.

The Wreckers, Zimbabwean author George Makana Clarke's American debut novel, will appeal to readers of García Márquez, Eleanor Catton, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, A.S. Byatt, Richard Flanagan, Patrick O'Brian, Susanna Clarke, Yaa Ghasi, David Mitchell, and Colum McCann. Ambitious yet accessible, literary yet commercial, this is a rare, audience-expanding novel.