A crack in the edge of the world - Simon Winchester

San Francisco was a city living on borrowed time when, on the morning of 18 April 1906, a massive earthquake roared through the town. Houses crashed to the ground, fires raged for days, and the inhabitants were left to wonder how their city, built on the dreams of the Gold Rush, could have been destroyed in less than a minute.

A Crack in the Edge of the World brings to life the extraordinary tales of human endeavour at the heart of one of America’s worst natural disasters: the scientists who made sense of an uncharted land and the men and women who transformed it, the shameless insurance salesmen and the pioneers of the city’s monumental recovery. Then, dipping beneath the surface of the earth, Winchester brilliantly demonstrates just why the earth moves as it does, and how it will again . . .