"Wreck" by Catherine Newman, the New York Times bestselling author of "Catastrophic Happiness," "Waiting for Birdy," "We All Want Impossible Things," and "Sandwich," is our "GMA" Book Club pick for November.
Newman, who has also written beloved books for younger readers including "One Mixed-Up Night," "What Can I Say?" and "How to Be a Person," delivers a touching new novel about love, loss and the messy beauty of family life.
In "Wreck," readers are reunited with Rocky and her wonderfully quirky family two years after their Cape Cod vacation, detailed in Newman's novel "Sandwich."
Now living in Western Massachusetts, Rocky navigates the chaos of adult children moving back home, the complexities of marriage, and caring for her father who has also moved in under her roof. "It all couldn't be more ridiculously normal... until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them -- and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won't affect them at all," a synopsis reads. With warmth, wit, and honesty, "Wreck" captures the laughter and tears of ordinary life in a way that feels both timeless and true.Read along with us and join the conversation all month on our Instagram account, @GMABookClub, and with #GMABookClub.
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The dark grid of the town is punctuated only with streetlamps and garage lights and fireflies, although the bird can sense every living thing: ripples beneath a crisping lawn, a body's rogue cells, the smell of vole, a mother's worried heart beating inside her rib cage.
Here's something else it sees: a car moving perpendicular to a moving train, both slicing through the quiet toward the same crossing.
The car travels at one speed, the train another, and this great horned owl, perched on the branch of an Eastern white pine a hundred and fifty feet above them, doesn't know algebra can't predict when car and train will intersect but if it had hands, it would cover its ears.
Because a great screeching has begun.
Chapter 1
In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path. Even if I don't know it at the time. And even if you might not technically call it day, given that it's the middle of the night.
There's a headlamp shining out from my forehead like I'm a miner, and what I'm mining is my own insomnia.
Like I'm a spelunker, penetrating a deep cave that is filled only and completely with the absence of sleep.
I move my hand to turn a page of the novel I'm reading, and the light catches something on my arm, just below my elbow: a red bump with three smaller red bumps trailing away from it -- a kind of dermatological shooting star.
The bumps are spherical and shiny. Pearlescent is the word that comes to me.
Hey, Nick, what do you think this is? I don't say out loud, because my husband is asleep the way regular people are at 3:38 a.m. Also because I know he wouldn't help me.
He'd peer at the bumps and shrug. Spider bites? Or he'd say, Here? and touch my boob because we are starring in a perpetual middle-aged remake of Porky's II.
Or, worse, he'd squint at them and say, I can't see anything. This? and point to a freckle that is completely unrelated to the likelihood of my imminent death from pearlescent melanoma or whatever the actual fuck this is.
I click off my headlamp and lie in the dark, listening to the late August crickets sing their song about the night. The trick, as every insomniac knows, is to fall back to sleep before the birds start singing their song about the morning. Don't google it, I think to myself -- too late, because I am already up and headed for the kitchen, where I leave my phone so I won't look at it in the middle of the night.
"No, no, sillies, not yet," I say to the pussycats, who are busy flinging themselves past me down the stairs, falling down the stairs in front of me, talking all the way down the stairs about their breakfast and how excited they are to eat it. I can only assume that this is how I will break my first hip.
Here's what's true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don't write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!
Because after I return to bed, take a picture of the bumps, and plug it into the search engine, and after I wade past the WebMD shallows of bites and mites, I am deep in the Reddit thread r/melahomies, where one person has responded to another, like the world's most perfect bumper sticker, "just because you're a hypochondriac doesn't mean it's not malignant."
But what's also true is that this really doesn't look like any of the truly bad skin things. If it's galactic, it's more champagne supernova than, say, dark nebula.
If it's cancer, it's more basal cell carcinoma than metastatic melanoma. Suboptimal, sure, but not catastrophic. Knock wood, kinahora, inshallah, etc.
Chicken, the older cat, is pleading his case for me to return downstairs and open a can of food. He is standing on my chest and neck, peering around the phone with his massive face, purring encouragingly, and drooling like a Newfoundland.
He gives my eyebrow an occasional perfunctory lick.
Meanwhile Angie the tabby-striped kitten is asleep again, curled around herself on my pillow like a hibernating chipmunk. I have to stop myself from waking Nick to exclaim with me over the unbearable cuteness of her being.
"Hey, Big Chungus," I whisper-scold the big cat, kissing his whiskery cheeks.
"Take a little break from yourself." I turn on my side and he sighs, gives up, curls into the crook of my hip and falls immediately, voluptuously to sleep, snoring like a cartoon human.
I am putting my phone away. I am. But I just peek at the local news and there, among the usual headlines about the county fair and the lunch menu at the senior center and a resigning town administrator, is this: "One Dead in Collision between Train, Car."
And a flush of goose bumps rises up my arms. The birds are singing.
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From "WRECK" by Catherine Newman. Copyright© 2025 by Catherine Newman. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
