Wreck 🏡

By Catherine Newman.

There is something deeply comforting about returning to characters who already feel like people you know, and Wreckdelivers exactly that.

Coming back to Rocky and her family felt like slipping into a familiar rhythm, one filled with humour, tenderness, anxiety, and the quiet weight of everyday life.

Set two years after their Cape Cod holiday, we find Rocky living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick. Their daughter Willa has returned home after college, their son Jamie is building a life in New York, and Rocky’s widowed father Mort has moved in.

On the surface, everything feels ordinary in the way only family life can be. Meals, conversations, worries, love, and irritation all sit side by side.

Rocky is still anxious, nostalgic, sharp, and endlessly funny. Her inner monologue is as relatable as ever, particularly as she becomes fixated on a local accident that barely touches their lives and a medical concern she desperately hopes will not.

That sense of spiralling thought, of latching onto uncertainty because it feels safer than confronting the bigger fear, is written with such honesty that it often feels uncomfortably real.

Catherine Newman excels at capturing the unspoken rules of family, the way love can be both grounding and suffocating, and how people rarely behave exactly as we want them to, even when they adore us. The family dynamics feel lived in rather than constructed. Emotions run high, misunderstandings happen, and yet the affection underneath never disappears.

One of the strongest elements of the book is the relationship between Rocky and Willa. Their mother daughter bond is messy, funny, tender, and deeply human. Their conversations are filled with questions neither of them can answer, circling around fear, adulthood, and what it means to let go. It is affectionate without being sentimental and honest without being cruel.

Wreck is about family life in all its chaotic complexity. It is about health scares, obsession, love, disappointment, and the strange comfort of routines that continue even when everything feels uncertain.

This is a book that understands how fragile normality can be, and how powerful love remains even when nothing goes to plan.

Thank you to the team at Double Day for sending me a finished copy in time for publication day. The book is out now and available to purchase.

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