The Dew of Their Youth

Set in a Galloway village and told with the warmth of long memory, this novel follows young Duncan MacAlpine as he grows up around the Eden Valley Academy and into the adventures and first attachments of early manhood. Much of the story gathers around the shuttered Haunted House of Marnhoul and its unexpected occupants, Irma Maitland and her brother Louis, so that boyhood mystery and a slow-kindling romance run alongside lessons, rivalries, small-town gossip, and a strand of coastal smuggling. Crockett writes in the Kailyard tradition, drawing rural Scotland in close, affectionate detail. Readers who enjoy coming-of-age fiction with a strong sense of place will find it gentle, atmospheric, and rooted in a way of life that was already passing. It rounds out the shelf of a novelist once read widely across the English-speaking world.