'I am foreborn of spud runts who fled the famines of Ireland in the 1830s, not a man or woman among them more than five foot two, leaving behind a life of beggarment and setting sail for what since Malory were called the Happy Isles…'So begins Baltimore's Mansion, Wayne Johnston's story of his grandfather Charlie, his father Arthur and of the small community of Ferryland on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, founded as a Catholic community by Lord Baltimore in the 1620s.Charlie, a fisherman and blacksmith, is an ardent Newfoundland nationalist. His son Arthur, forced from boyhood to fish the freezing seas with his father, vows never to earn his living from Newfoundland's dangerous waters. He leaves the island in the heady months before the fateful 1948 referendum decides Newfoundland's future. While Arthur is away Charlie dies and Newfoundland cedes its independence to Canada, plunging Arthur into a lifelong battle with the personal demons that haunted the end of their relationship. Years later, Wayne Johnston himself decides to leave Newfoundland and old patterns threaten to repeat themselves.Acclaimed as one of Canada's finest novelists, Wayne Johnston has written an intimate, captivating and deeply felt memoir centred on three generations of his own family. At times harrowing, at others both moving and funny, Baltimore's Mansion, speaks to us all about the hardships, blessings and power of family relationships, of love of country, of exile and of returning home.