The Sun in the Morning
Jim Hunter
Hardcover
(Oxford University Press, March 15, 1975)
(Jim Hunter's novel is very specifically rooted in time and place. The main characters with whom we are concerned have their earliest childhood experiences in war-time England, while their adolescent anguishes and joys have as their background the Fifties, that period of significant and tremendous social upheaval, which Jim Hunter brings to life as an almost tangible reality. And place is a town in the North of England, Emthorpe; an ordinary industrial town with open country not far away. But the characters and their development have a universal application and the fundamental nature of the experiences described belongs to any age and environment. Jim Hunter was not quite twenty-one when he finished THE SUN IN THE MORNING, and when it was first published in 1961, it was received enthusiastically by critics, who praised its freshness and its truth to life; the Authors' Club indeed awarded it their prize for the best first novel of the year. Now a new edition of the novel appears, and so another generation can enjoy this remarkably perceptive study of childhood and adolescence)