Hawkes Harbor

Synopsis

An orphan and a bastard, Jamie Sommers grew up knowing he had no hope of heaven. Conceived in adultery and born in sin, Jamie was destined to repeat the sins of his parents - or so the nuns told him. And he proved them right. Taking to the sea, Jamie sought out danger and adventure in exotic ports all over the world as a smuggler, gunrunner - and murderer. Tough enough to handle anything, he's survived foreign prisons, pirates and a shark attack. But in a quiet seaside town in Delaware, Jamie discovered something that was enough to drive him insane - and change his life forever. For it was in Hawkes Harbor that Jamie came face to face with the ultimate evil....

NOT FOR TEENS! Sexual situations, violence, language.

S. E. Hinton on the book

Hawkes Harbor is my first novel for an adult audience. I was getting itchy to write something different. One of the perks of being a writer is having adventures while never leaving home, and boy, did I have some adventures with this one.

The narrative style, for instance, incorporating flashbacks with the present was a challenge. Especially since the flashbacks are not in chronological order. I even managed to stick in a flash-forward. I got to go to exotic places. Write scenes of tragedy and humor, sometimes both at the same time. Since all of the characters have distinctive speech patterns, the dialog was was very fun to write.

Hawkes Harbor, though different from my other books, is still very much a "S.E. Hinton" novel-character driven, focusing on relationships, a story of one man's journey to a different view of the world.

I think most writers begin because writing is fun-which grows out of a conviction that reading is fun. My hope for readers of Hawke's Harbor is that they have as much pleasure in reading it as I did writing it.