On The Same Page discussion

This is the same author who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. I'm eager to see what he does with this story, which sounds super interesting.

I'm looking forward to reading this with all of you!

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

OK, I'm way ahead of everyone this month. I'm about to start this one, but I can slow down if others are going to join. Otherwise, I can just start and you guys can read it when you get to it! I do also have War and Peace on the go...maybe that's why I'm wanting to read everything except that book. LOL. :-)

Yes, you are :-)
I just started Weyward today; The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder will probably be my next read, maybe next week?
W&P...you are a brave woman. Read/read or audiobook read? Anyway, it looks like you're making good progress.

Ioana wrote: "Yes, you are :-)
I just started Weyward today; The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder will probably be my next read, maybe next week?
W&P...you are a brave woman. Read/read or audiobook read? Anyway, it looks like you're making good progress."

Oh, yay! I will focus on W & P, which I'm listening to the audio. It's a terrible narrator, though. I almost wish I was reading the book, but I had too many paper books to read this month, and I didn't want to stop. Let me know when you get back to The Wager and we can read it together. :-)

Sounds good. I have some life things to take care of in the next weeks, but I hope to have enough time for these 2 books this month.

Ioana wrote: "Sounds good. I have some life things to take care of in the next weeks, but I hope to have enough time for these 2 books this month."

Sounds good. I have 18 days left on the book, so I will hopefully make some progress on W & P, and read this one later in the month, before I have to return it to the library.