The Wake | CBC Books - Action News
Home WebMail Tuesday, November 26, 2024, 10:25 AM | Calgary | -16.2°C | Regions Advertise Login | Our platform is in maintenance mode. Some URLs may not be available. |
BooksCanadian

The Wake

The Wake is a nonfiction book by Linden MacIntyre.

Linden MacIntyre

On Nov.18, 1929, a tsunami struck Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula. Giant waves, up to three storeys high, hit the coast at a 100 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 28 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, N.L., 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 28 people in 1929, it would claim hundreds if not thousands more lives 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. (From HarperCollins Canada)

Linden MacIntyre is a former CBC journalist and novelist. His novel The Bishop's Man won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2009.

From the book

St. John's was a distant world, in many ways irrelevant, except when it came to pricing fish, which were the economic staple for everyone who lived in the remote, sparsely populated island nation, Newfoundland. There was no road between the capital and the southern peninsula called the Burin. France was closer than St. John's the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were just twenty miles away. The people there were fiercelyFrench. But they mingled, married, did business officially and unofficially with the nearby Newfoundlanders.


From The Wakeby Linden MacIntyre 2019. Published by HarperCollins.

Interviews with Linden MacIntyre

Shelagh's extended conversation with Linden MacIntyre, author of "Punishment".

Other books by Linden MacIntyre

Add some good to your morning and evening.

Sign up for our newsletter. Well send you book recommendations, CanLit news, the best author interviews on CBC and more.

...

The next issue of CBC Books newsletter will soon be in your inbox.

Discover all CBC newsletters in theSubscription Centre.opens new window

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service apply.