Vintage Children's Classics publish the best books in a beautiful, affordable and accessible styleGrowth of children's market: Office for National Statistics indicates an 11% growth in primary-aged children to 2026.Includes the original illustrations and maps by Arthur RansomeExtra material included in the ‘Backstory’Ransome was the 1930s equivalent of JK Rowling - the Swallows and Amazons series had sold more than a million copies by the time the last was published, and have sold many millions more sinceThe Arthur Ransome Society (TARS) boasts more than 2,000 members, with groups in North America, Australia and Japan exchanging news and views on the exploits of Captain John and his crew through such august publications as The Outlaw and Ship's LogArthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884. He had an adventurous life - as a baby in he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak that is 2,276ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. On their return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote: ‘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 children's classics, the twelve Swallows And Amazons books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book,
Pigeon Post. He died in 1967.
'Like to spend a night in the Goblin?’
The Swallows are staying on the Suffolk coast while they wait for their father to return home from China. But although the harbour is bursting with bobbing yachts, barges and steamers, this year there's no chance of any sailing for the landlocked Swallows. That is until they rescue young Jim Brading and his boat the Goblin from a sticky situation and to their delight are recruited as crew members. Mother agrees they can go, on one condition – they absolutely must not sail out past Beach End Buoy and into the open sea…
Includes exclusive content: In the 'Backstory' you can test your knowledge of the book, and learn all about the art of sailing!
Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The seventh of the Arthur Ransome books about the Swallows and the Amazons, and I really think it is the bestThe most exciting of the whole Swallows and Amazon seriesThis book is Ransome at the top of his formThe book is a record of an uncovenanted voyage, which ended in Holland, of the rain and wind, the darkness and the wild water, the escapes from buoys and from ships crossing in the night, the courage and resource of the childrenPerhaps the best of all ... Just what does happen is told with all the wealth of practical detail and satisfying sense of reality which make Mr Ransome so unfailingly successful
