Ken is a scientist, with a scientist's dispassionate eye for the material world, as he reviews his life from the difficult thirties, through the slaughter of the First World War, back to an idyllic boyhood in the Highlands. When the mature man finally reaches the source of the river that has haunted his imagination for so many years, he finds that the well-springs of magic and delight were always there, in the world all around him at the time, inexhaustible and irreverent.

Awarded the James Tait Memorial Prize 1937, Highland River is written in prose as cool and clear as the water it describes, and is the simplest, most poetic and perhaps the greatest of Neil Gunn's novels.

The Reviews