Sold at a hiring fair as a boy, Dermod Flynn leaves the poverty of Donegal for potato-picking gangs, model lodging-houses and the great navvy works at Kinlochleven in the Scottish Highlands. Moleskin Joe, Carroty Dan and the doomed Norah Ryan are drawn from people MacGill knew, and the hard labour, drink and danger are his own.
The ‘navvy poet’s’ autobiographical novel of 1914, among the most vivid accounts of itinerant labour in British literature. Download the free EPUB.