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Meet Author David Grann

TICKETED EVENT: $30

Each General Admission ticket ($30) includes event admission, a copy of The Wager, and a donation to the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation.   

About the author:

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. On January 28, 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 the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that 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.

FAQs

Additional books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Mac’s Backs – Books on Coventry.

For questions about accessibility or to request accommodations for individuals with hearing, visual or mobility impairments, please email [email protected].

NO REFUNDS. If you are unable to attend the event, please contact [email protected] to claim the book(s) included with your ticket purchase and schedule pick up from the CCPL branch of your choice. Books not claimed within 7 days of the event will be donated to the Library.

Questions? Email us at [email protected].