Synopsis "The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder "

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire. 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.

David Grann

(Author)

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David Grann (New York, 1967) is a writer and journalist at The New Yorker. His stories have appeared in various anthologies, including The Best American Crime Writing of 2004, 2005, and 2009; and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006. A finalist in 2005 for the Michael Kelly Award for his "courageous pursuit and expression of the truth", Grann has also contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications. His first novel, Z, the lost city (Literatura Random House, 2017) was a number one bestseller according to The New York Times, has been translated into more than 25 languages, and has been made into a major film. Literatura Random House has also published The Old Man and the Gun, which was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford.

His latest book, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been a bestseller by The New York Times and considered by the American press as one of the best books of 2017. It has also been awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Di Caprio are preparing its film adaptation.

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