Hawkes Harbor is an (2004

2004 in literature

The year 2004 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Canada Reads selects Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing to be read across the nation....

) novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by S. E. Hinton

S. E. Hinton

Susan Eloise Hinton is an American author best known for her young adult novel The Outsiders.While still in her teens, Hinton became a household name as the author of The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, set in Oklahoma in the 1960s. She began writing it in 1965...

. Hinton wrote for a young adult audience, though it retains the style for which she is known.

Plot summary

Orphaned and illegitimate, Jamie Sommers grows up believing he has "no hope of heaven", that he is doomed to a dreadful existence. A Catholic, he is deeply depressed by the ideas of being conceived in adultery and born in sin. The impressionable Jamie is repeatedly told by mean nuns in the Bronx, that he is destined to repeat the sins of his parents and he proves them right. Taking to the sea, Jamie seeks out danger and adventure in exotic ports all over the world as a smuggler, gun runner – and murderer. Life became a constant struggle in his search for excitement and fulfillment. Also Jamie believed he didn't deserve a better life than has, so he chooses to worsen himself. Tough enough to handle anything, he survives foreign prisons, pirates and a shark attack. But in a quiet seaside town in Delaware

Delaware

Delaware is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, and to the north by Pennsylvania...

, Jamie discovers something that pushes him over the edge mentally and changes his life forever.