In an industrial town located on the sea, where the incipient economic boom has not yet arrived, a friendship is born between an orphan boy, who lives with his grandmother, and a poacher fisherman. The emotional bond develops rapidly, not without contradictions, and contributes, together with the study, to the formation of the protagonist, until he comes to meet and clash with an early sentimental education that constitutes the premise of the final maturation.

Through the details of everyday life, the novel offers the cross-section of a now vanished Italy, in which the scarcity of the means was compensated by the solidity of social bonds and moral values. But on every aspect of the story dominates the love for the sea and its creatures, which knows no boundaries of age or season.