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Wreck

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Wreck

By: Catherine Newman
Narrated by: Helen Laser
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, a wonderful novel full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family. and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned…

Rachel (Rocky) is seemingly living her best life as the irreverent, funny beating heart of her family. Her ageing father is his unique, adorable self; daughter Willa is prone to bouts of existential angst whilst berating the fact that her mother has zero filter; husband Nick is steady, logical, sometimes infuriating.

They are messy, they are flawed, they are completely, ridiculously normal.

And like most normal people, Rocky worries about what might happen next. So when a former classmate of her son Jamie dies in a seemingly random accident, Rocky becomes obsessed.

For if accidents can happen – and they do – is it truly safe to love anyone?

Fresh, honest, laugh out loud funny and genuinely relatable, WRECK follows Rocky and her family through one rollercoaster year as they negotiate the unpredictable and beautiful messiness of life.

'The kind of book that pulls up a chair, pours the wine, and dives deep... like spending hours with the friend who sees your mess and loves you more for it.' ALISON ESPACH, author of The Wedding People

'Hugely enjoyable, absolutely real and thoughtful...Newman has an Ephon-esque gift for blending the sharp and the sad and an ability to let us love her creations.’ Observer

'I LOVE her work... the antidote to these times' MARIAN KEYES

© Catherine Newman 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Family Life Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Funny Heartfelt Witty

Critic Reviews

Beautiful, funny, wry, relatable and uplifting… I LOVE her work, it's so clever and comforting and the antidote to these times.
Wreck is the kind of book that pulls up a chair, pours the wine, and dives deep—equal parts hilarious, sharp, and achingly sincere. It’s like spending hours with the friend who sees your mess and loves you more for it. I didn’t just read it—I felt known by it. A luminous, laugh-out-loud triumph by Newman.
I loved it! A gorgeously human, tender-hearted, and delightfully funny exploration of the anxieties that beset all of us, and the loving relationships and irrepressible joy that gets us through.
Another heart wrencher from the incomparable Catherine Newman. She writes about the minutiae of family, love and why we are here with such joy, humour and emotion it almost hurts. I laughed out loud along the way, then the final page had me in tears. Wrecked me!
How comforting, how satisfying, and how delicious to be once again in the world of Rocky and her family where everyday life bangs against potential disaster and somehow muddles its way through. Infectiously funny and surprisingly moving, Wreck reminds us that we are each, in our way, trying to make sense of the big things with some very small tools - and that love in the end is the thing that saves us.
Catherine Newman is the funniest and most tender hearted writer alive. I hope people are reading Wreck for years to come. Rocky and everyone in her universe shows as what humans can do and be when we're at our very best.
Endorsing a new Catherine Newman novel feels a bit like endorsing puppies or chocolate cake. It's a new Catherine Newman novel. Of course you want to read it. Wreck is a delight. .. Newman's prose is laugh-out-loud funny. It's also profound. I underlined so many passages in this treasure of a novel. I
Catherine Newman’s new novel is a rare thing: both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply attuned to the quiet devastations of illness, grief, and family life. In Rocky... Newman gives us a narrator whose fierce intelligence and generous heart make even the most ordinary moments shimmer with grace.
Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines . . . . A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
Catherine Newman has my heart . . . . Newman is my dream writer, and she channels the perfect cocktail of humanity into her characters, especially Rocky. Rocky is funny and dry and emotional and sometimes crazy and always loving, so loving, of her family, even as she struggles and panics. It’s a gift to get to be on the quest with her, and learn alongside her, about how to be alive, to be a person, to be good, to be worthy.
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