Michael Crummy wrote (another) lovely novel in The Wreckage. Set in Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada, triva folks!) during WWII this precise romance just… wrecks you (get it? GET IT). Wish Furey, Catholic, falls for Mercedes (Sadie) Parsons (Protestant) and her mother Won’t Have It. So they have some secret romps and then through a series of accidents get separated and oops Wish goes off an enlists and gets shipped off to fight the Japanese. *lots of spoilers follow*
Only to encounter this Japanese soldier, Nishino – born and raised in racist Vancouver – who is represented as sadistic with a particular cruelty toward Canadians (and friends of Canadians, like Wish). And so over the war Sadie waits, Wish gets by in a POW camp being tortured by Nishino and then witnesses the detonation of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. By the time Wish gets home he’s deeply changed by what he has done, seen and had done to him. It’s the sort of thing you know: effects of war and trauma, and yet somehow its made fresh in the decades of suffering that follow this one small, particular person, what is lost for both of them.
It does what historical fiction does best and shakes the snow globe of the present to let the reader see it as it is, but slightly different. And so with daily stories of horror and trauma around the world The Wreckage helped this reader begin to grasp the impossibility of scale of loss. If we humans can’t make sense of big numbers (I heard that somewhere, I know you have to) The Wreckage lets us see in this one man, this one couple, all that is destroyed and lost. And that we cannot look away.