<DIV>Ken is a scientist, with a scientist's dispassionate eye for the material world, as he reviews his life from the difficult 1930s, through the slaughter of World War I, 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 wellsprings 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, <I>Highland River</I> 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.</DIV>