Originally published in 1930, Breakers, the first novel by Nancy Brysson Morrison, explores the damage that rejection and frustrated potential can inflict. Following a casual affair with a local farmer's son, Euphemia Gillespie, daughter of the disillusioned and ineffectual minister of Barnfingal, is sent into the obscurity of the coastal village of Stonemerns where she gives birth to a son.

Left in the care of a former family servant, Callum Lamont grows up a troubled soul ignorant of his true parentage. Finding some measure of happiness in his work as a farm labourer on the farm of Inchbuigh, where he also encounters first love, his life promises some future contentment. Callum's plans are shattered, however, when Inchbuigh becomes a victim of the Highland Clearances - the account of which offers a unique literary portrayal of the period - and on being driven back to Stonemerns he discovers his mother's name and social status. Determined to claim his birthright, he travels to Barnfingal, where he sets in motion a sequence of events that bring disaster not only to his mother's family, but also to himself. Breakers is then a chilling account of the ramifications of abandonment - both by the individual and by the cruel legislators of Scotland in the early nineteenth century.