The Wager

Resumen del libro

On 28th January 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 chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas.

They were greeted as heroes. Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes they were mutineers.

The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. 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.

Biografía del autor

P B David Grann /B (Nueva York, 1967) es escritor y periodista en I The New Yorker /I . Sus historias han aparecido en distintas antologías, incluyendo The Best American Crime Writing de 2004, 2005 y 2009; y The Best American Sports Writing de 2003 y 2006. Finalista en 2005 del Michael Kelly Award por su valiente búsqueda y expresión de la verdad , Grann también ha colaborado con I The New York Times Magazine /I , I The Wall Street Journal /I , I The Atlantic /I y I The New Republic /I , entre otras publicaciones. Su primera novela, I Z, la ciudad perdida /I (Literatura Random House, 2017) fue número uno de ventas según I The New York Times, /I ha sido traducida a más de 25 idiomas y ha sido llevada a la gran pantalla. Literatura Random House también ha publicado I El viejo y la pistola /I , en el que se ha basado la película protagonizada por Robert Redford. Su último libro, I Los asesinos de la luna, /I ha sido best seller por I The New York Times /I y considerado por la prensa estadounidense como uno de los mejores libros de 2017. Ha sido galardonado a su vez con Edgar Allan Poe Award al Best Fact Crime, y ha sido finalista del National Book Award. Martin Scorsese y Leonardo Di Caprio están preparando su versión cinematográfica.<br>