A Crack in the Edge of World

Just before dawn on 18th April 1906 and for little short of a minute the earth very briefly shrugged. For the inhabitants of the western part of North America the effect was immediate and horrifying: a massive earthquake roared through the city of San Francisco, tearing through the main thoroughfare of the town in huge undulating waves, as the entire surface of the earth, and everything that stood upon it, seemed to lift up and roll in from the ocean. Houses crashed to the ground, people were shaken from their beds, chimneys fell in on themselves and within moments great fires burst into life across the city and raged for three terrifying days. Simon Winchester's breathtaking new book follows the story of the city that was built on the dreams of the American gold rush and was destroyed in less than a minute. Threaded through the extraordinary tales of human endeavour, the stories of the scientists who made sense of an uncharted land, the men and women who then settled and transformed the American West, the appalling scale of the destruction and of the shameful insurance scams, is the elemental story of the earth itself: as Simon Winchester dives deep beneath the surface of our world he shows us just why the earth moves as it does and on occasion shatters itself with such devastating results. With his inimitable voice and by way of a narrative rich with anecdote and enlightening detail, Winchester reveals the world beneath our feet and, in telling what is in essence a universal story of man's confrontation with a most pitiless nature, helps to make sense of our world now.