On November 18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula. Giant waves, up to three storeys high, hit the coast, flooding dozens of communities and washing entire houses out to sea. The disaster killed twenty-eight people and left hundreds more destitute, forever changing the lives of the fishing outport communities.
Scotiabank Giller Prize - winning writer Linden MacIntyre was born near St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, one of the villages on the south shore. By the early 1940s, the cod-fishing industry lay in ruins and the village had become a mining town. MacIntyre's father worked in an underground mine that was later found to be radioactive, continuing the tsunami's legacy and claiming hundreds more lives in the decades that followed. And as the south coast fishery struggled to regain its foothold as cod stocks plummeted, St. Lawrence found itself, once again, looking to the mining industry for economic salvation. Written in MacIntyre's trademark style, The Wake offers Canadians a piece of their history not to be forgotten.
