File Updated: 01/04/00

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Review JULY-SEPT 1998
James Bradley Wrack Pbk published August 1998 by Review at £6.99 ISBN: 0 7472 6045 1 Artwork by: Cover photograph: Mel Allen/Images Colour Library

Archaeologist David Norfolk is searching for a wreck of a Portuguese caravel he believes has been buried in the ever shifting sand dunes of New South Wales - a find which would re-write the history of Australia. But when David unearths the body of a man murdered fifty years before, he happens upon a more personal history. An elderly recluse, dying in a nearby shack, seems to know something of the corpse's identity - and also its connection to the mysterious ship.
Wrack shows the past to be as nebulous as the future and our grasp on it to be equally tenuous. Bradley's great skill is to take such traditional ingredients as passion, murder, myth and history and bind them in a fresh and compulsive way.

Wrack was published in Australia to literary acclaim:
'A highly original work...Bradley commends an admirable maturity of imagination and style' Sydney Morning Herald
'A confident first novel...beautiful prose' The Sunday Age
'What an ambitious, intelligent and provocative first novel' Courier Mail

On its publication Wrack shot high into the Australian best-seller lists, and has had the distinction of being adopted onto the academic syllabus. James Bradley was shortlisted for Australia's most prestigious awards: the Miles Franklin, he won the Federation of Australian Writers Literature Award, the Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award and was shortlisted for the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First book he has also recently been named as one of Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists.
James Bradley was born in Adelaide in 1967. He is the author of a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus. He has worked as a law clerk, judge's associate, solicitor, research assistant and editor. He lives in Sydney.

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