Publisher's Weekly

'With fabulous style, wit and grace . . . bestselling writer Winchester has crafted a magnificent testament to the power of planet earth'

Independent on Sunday

'Captivatingly readable . . . written with a passion and intelligence that make it compelling'

About the Author

Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, Ireland, India and China, and now lives in New York city and the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and newspapers and is the author of many highly acclaimed works of non-fiction. His most recent books have been the three international bestsellers, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, The Map that Changed the World and Krakatoa.

Excerpted from A Crack in the Edge of the World: The Great Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I walked back downhill, enchanted and fascinated by all I had seen. And then there came to me the one word that, more than any other, has stayed with me and has haunted me since that morning – a word the relevance of which was only compounded by what I knew, by what all of us knew, of San Francisco’s history. As I folded my tent, cleaned up my campsite and packed the car for the last thirty-odd miles back down the hillside and on to the freeway that would eventually take me over that enormous series of iron bridges and into the city itself, one word kept running around and around in my mind. This fragile, enchanting-looking city also looked, more than anything else, most terribly and fatally VULNERABLE.