Labrador Days

A gathering of eleven stories drawn from Grenfell’s years as a doctor along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, this 1919 collection turns the hard lives of northern fisher-folk into fiction. Grenfell writes of families scraping a living from a cruel sea, of rescues carried out over drift ice, and of small acts of courage in isolated harbours where a physician might reach a patient only once in a season. The tales carry blunt titles like “There’s Trouble on the Sea” and “The Doctor’s Big Fee,” moving between plain adventure and quiet moral reflection. Because Grenfell knew this world at first hand, the book reads closer to witness than invention. It stands as a warm, unsentimental record of a vanishing way of life on one of the harshest coasts in the North Atlantic.