Peter Waring (1937) is a full-scale revision of Reid's earlier Following Darkness (1912) in which Peter, a sensitive boy with literary inclinations, grows up unhappily in the household of his father, a cold village schoolmaster in Newcastle, County Down, and among his Belfast relatives whom he finds intolerable.

'An acute and subtle story of adolescence.... A delicacy and a grave beauty which make their own quiet appeal.' Times

'Reid has written one of the finest studies of the mental, sexual, spiritual life of the adolescent without ever mentioning the words.' Glasgow Herald