The Wake

In the vein of Wayne Johnston's The Colonony of Unrequired Dreams and Erik Larson's 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, 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. At the time of...