Grandson of a bootmaker, son of an impoverished drunk, wrongly expelled schoolboy, failed journalist, would-be socialist firebrand and trade-union pioneer, Joey Smallwood suffered chronically from bad luck and poor judgement. Yet his rise to power, seems in retrospect to have been inevitable.
This book uses the unlikely career of Newfoundland's first premier as its starting point to create a mystery, a love story, and tragi-comic elegy which is nothing less than the national history of an impossible country stranded on the brink of the world.
