The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami [9781443452038]

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Fascinating,
infuriating, eloquent and cautionary.” —Postmedia

A Globe and Mail, CBC Books
and Maclean’s Book of the Year

In the vein of Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and Dead Wake comes an incredible true story of destruction and
survival in Newfoundland by one of Canada’s best-known writers

On November
18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula. Giant waves up to three
storeys high hit the coast at a hundred kilometres per hour, flooding dozens of
communities and washing entire houses out to sea. The most destructive
earthquake-related event in Newfoundland’s history, the disaster killed twenty-eight
people and left hundreds more homeless or destitute. It took days for the
outside world to find out about the death and damage caused by the tsunami,
which forever changed the lives of the inhabitants of the fishing outports
along the Burin Peninsula.

Scotiabank Giller
Prize–winning writer Linden MacIntyre was born near St. Lawrence, Newfoundland,
one of the villages virtually destroyed by the tsunami. By the time of his
birth, the cod-fishing industry lay in ruins and the village had become a
mining town. MacIntyre’s father, lured from Cape Breton to Newfoundland by a
steady salary, worked in St. Lawrence in an underground mine that was later
found to be radioactive. Hundreds of miners would die; hundreds more would
struggle through shortened lives profoundly compromised by lung diseases ranging
from silicosis and bronchitis to cancer. As MacIntyre says, though the tsunami
killed twenty-eight people in 1929, it would claim hundreds if not thousands
more in the decades to follow. And by the time the village returned to its
roots and set up as a cod fishery once again, the stocks in the Grand Banks had
plummeted and St. Lawrence found itself once again on the brink of disaster.

Written in MacIntyre’s
trademark style, The Wake is a major
new work by one of this country’s top writers.