Mizzly Fitch struggles to come to terms with the destructive forces of the sea, the deaths of fellow fishermen, and his growing religious despair, which pits him against his mother, who has hopes that he will become a minister. The first cod come, and it was a big fish. I gaffed her off, and there was another slapping over the roller. You couldn't sit back and think on it. Cod was coming in every fifteen or twenty hooks. I'm knocking them into the bottom of the boat and Dad's baiting up as the hooks run by him. We's to our shins in fish in maybe half an hour and still they's coming in. I starts laughing and Dad's hollering and the water's breaking bright with fish, and the next thing I hears is the dories going over the side of the vessel. Joshua tells us later, "The old man's waiting for a signal from one of you, and then he sees you're bent over working the trawl so hard! 'In the name of God,' he says to us, 'get the dories over the side.' And that's what we done, the bunch of us running and shouting and pulling at the boats. The way we went at it, why, you'd of thought there's none of the boys here has ever seen cod on a hook before." This enthralling and powerful novel transforms tragedy into a vibrant celebration of the human capacity to endure.