The Big Land

A History of Newfoundland & Labrador

By: Daniel Hardy

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A Sweeping History of Newfoundland & Labrador

Before there was a Canada, there was Newfoundland. For five hundred years, this wind-scoured island and its vast continental hinterland occupied a unique and turbulent place in the story of the Atlantic world — as the site of the first European landfall in the Americas, the source of a fishery that fed nations, and the home of peoples whose lives were shaped, and sometimes destroyed, by forces far beyond their shores.

In The Big Land, Daniel Hardy tells the full story of Newfoundland and Labrador with the sweep it deserves and the intimacy it demands. Beginning in deep geological time and ending in the unresolved present, Hardy moves from the ancient rock of Mistaken Point to the financial wreckage of Muskrat Falls, from the vanished Beothuk Nation to the landmark creation of Nunatsiavut, from Joey Smallwood's razor-thin referendum victory to the morning in 1992 when forty thousand people learned that the cod were gone.

This is a history of extraordinary landscapes and ordinary lives: the outport fisherman bound to a merchant by debt he could never repay; the Innu child taken from the interior to a coastal school; the rig worker who never came home from the Ocean Ranger; the musician who left for Toronto and wrote the most beautiful song about leaving anyone has ever heard.

Authoritative in its scholarship and alive on every page, The Big Land is essential reading