Morning tide - Neil M Gunn

Twelve-year-old Hugh MacBeth
lives in a small fishing village near Caithness at the end of the nineteenth
century. He is becoming aware of his mother's worries that he and his brother
will follow their father to sea, and is becoming to realise that the fishing
industry is doomed to decline, a decline that will result in the death of his
village. A lyrical and poignant novel Morning Tide describes how a young boy
learns to become a man. It is a poetic testimony to the intensity of feeling
in physical experience, the touch of the earth and the coldness of the sea,
and in the need to be free. Sensitivity and wildness are pitted against the
restrictions of family and social life, and it is more than a complete
picture of childhood; unfolding into a set of values that speaks powerfully
to the present.