Archaeologist David Norfolk is searching for a 400-year-old Portuguese shipwreck off the coast of New South Wales. Such a find would rewrite the history of Australia. But instead he unearths the body of a man murdered fifty years earlier, and begins to unravel a more personal kind of history. An elderly recluse, dying in a nearby shack, seems to know something of the corpse's identity - and also its connection to the shipwreck. He begins telling David about his own past, a story of a life marred by ambition, sexual passion, rivalry, deceit and betrayal. But will he give David the information he needs before it is too late? A haunting tale of the lure of the imagination and the destructive workings of obsession, Wrack is a first novel of unusual reach and suggestive power.

James Bradley was born in 1967. He has twice been named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists and has won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literature Award, the Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is the author of a collection of poetry called Paper Nautilus and the novels Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist. In 2008 The Resurrectionist was chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, becoming a massive bestseller. James lives in Sydney.