The Wake. The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami

NATIONAL BESTSELLER"Fascinating, infuriating, eloquent and cautionary." -PostmediaA Globe and Mail, CBC Booksand Maclean's Book of the YearIn the vein of Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm and Dead Wake comes an incredible true story of destruction andsurvival in Newfoundland by one of Canada's best-known writersOn November18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula. Giant waves up to threestoreys high hit the coast at a hundred kilometres per hour, flooding dozens ofcommunities and washing entire houses out to sea.
The most destructiveearthquake-related event in Newfoundland's history, the disaster killed twenty-eightpeople and left hundreds more homeless or destitute. It took days for theoutside world to find out about the death and damage caused by the tsunami, which forever changed the lives of the inhabitants of the fishing outportsalong the Burin Peninsula. Scotiabank GillerPrize-winning writer Linden MacIntyre was born near St.
Lawrence, Newfoundland, one of the villages virtually destroyed by the tsunami. By the time of hisbirth, the cod-fishing industry lay in ruins and the village had become amining town. MacIntyre's father, lured from Cape Breton to Newfoundland by asteady salary, worked in St. Lawrence in an underground mine that was laterfound to be radioactive. Hundreds of miners would die; hundreds more wouldstruggle through shortened lives profoundly compromised by lung diseases rangingfrom silicosis and bronchitis to cancer.
As MacIntyre says, though the tsunamikilled twenty-eight people in 1929, it would claim hundreds if not thousandsmore in the decades to follow. And by the time the village returned to itsroots and set up as a cod fishery once again, the stocks in the Grand Banks hadplummeted and St. Lawrence found itself once again on the brink of disaster. Written in MacIntyre'strademark style, The Wake is a majornew work by one of this country's top writers.