The Fate of Rosie Morn

December 1914. German warships are shelling Scarborough, and seventeen-year-old Will Topping is eighteen miles down the coast, gripping the winch brake of a minesweeper, powerless to stop it.

The North Sea is full of German mines, hidden just beneath the grey water. Every day the crew of HMT Rosie Morn steam out to find them, dragging a steel wire between two old fishing trawlers and waiting for it to snag. One mistake on the winch can snap the cable, foul the sweep, or bring a mine up under the hull.

Will is the youngest aboard and the smallest, and every man on deck knows his father begged the berth for him. They haven’t forgotten it. Neither has he.

He has one bitter winter to prove he is one of them. But out on the North Sea, among men who have spent their lives upon it, wanting to belong and being ready for what that means are very different things.

A gripping coming-of-age story of courage, fear and belonging. Inspired by the true story of the Rosy Morn, a Scarborough trawler lost to a mine in January 1916.