Broughton, Cape Breton, is your typical mining town, where the men all work down in the mine from an early age and are doomed to an early grave from industrial illnesses. One of the men, Archie MacNeil, has left his wife and young son behind to try his luck as a prize fighter in the United States. The town doctor feels a kinship with the son, Alan, and wants to do whatever he can to save Alan from a rough-and-tumble life in the mines.

Hugh MacLennan lived in such a town in Nova Scotia, so this novel is a homecoming for him. The phonetically rendered Gaelic-tinged accents can seem a bit much sometimes -- even the Frenchman doesn't have as strong an accent, or perhaps I was so surprised by the Scottish Gaelic accents that a French accent in print went unnoticed. The characters and the setting were vividly rendered, as you would expect from a novel written by a local, and while the back cover blurb discusses an event that doesn't happen until close to the end of the book, that event's impact is in no way lessened by the reader knowing that it will happen.

The more recent New Canadian Library edition has an afterword by Alec Lucas that dissects the book from a religious standpoint, which may be of greater interest to more serious students of literary criticism. I found that part dull. The main attraction is the book. I would recommend Each Man's Son if you like to read books set in Nova Scotia, have read Twenty-Six, by Leo McKay Jr., or if you've read and enjoyed Barometer Rising, MacLennan's original "Maritimes novel". ( )