Summary
The Swallows are marooned with just a little sailing boat for company - will they survive their chance to become true explorers?
‘You’ll start with a blank map, that doesn’t do more than show roughly what’s water and what isn’t’
When the Walker family’s holiday plans are ruined by Daddy having to work, the whole summer seems lost at sea. But a dull holiday for the children is too miserable to bear so their parents hatch a plan. The Swallows are to be marooned on an island with…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780099589365 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0099589362 |
| Author: | Arthur Ransome |
| Publisher: | Vintage Publishing |
| Imprint: | Vintage Children's Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 544 |
| Release Date: | 1 August 2014 |
| Weight: | 353g |
| Dimensions: | 30mm x 130mm x 190mm |
| Audience Age: | 9-11 |
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Critics Review
Once more the Swallows and the Amazons have a magnificent exploring adventure, one more Mr Arthur Ransome has kept a complete record of their experiences, terrors, triumphs, and set it down with the cunning that casts a spell over new children and old * Times Literary Supplement *
This time the Walker children are ‘marooned’ on an island somewhere in England, and for their adventures there is but one word - enchanting! * Sunday Times *
Many of the adventures were set in the Lakes, but my favourite is the one set at the other end of the country: Secret Water – Graham Hoyland * Independent *
Arthur Ransome
Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884. His life was filled with adventure; as a baby, his father carried him to the summit of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak 2,276 feet high.
He traveled to Russia in 1913 to study folklore. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, he worked as a journalist and was a special correspondent for The Guardian. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky’s personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina.
Upon returning to England, Ransome purchased a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District, where he began writing children’s stories. In an author’s note from 1958, Ransome explained the genesis of Swallows and Amazons: “I have been often asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above … Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind’s eye, could see the beloved sky-line of great hills beneath it. Swallows grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.”
He published the first of his twelve Swallows and Amazons books in 1930. In 1936, he received the inaugural Carnegie Medal for his book, Pigeon Post. Arthur Ransome died in 1967.
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