Henry Harper is born in a rag-and-bone dealer’s yard in a foggy Midland textile town and grows up feeding his imagination on serialised tales of desert islands. The novel follows him out of the slum, onto ships and through a hard apprenticeship to the world, toward the life he means to make for himself.
A substantial Edwardian novel of growing up poor, more character study than sea yarn; some of its language about race is that of 1916. Download the free EPUB.