Breathtaking and daring, this is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. When orphan David Balfour is shipwrecked off the Scottish coast he miraculously survives with one companion, Alan Breck. Together, the two set off across the treacherous terrain of the Scottish highlands. They are determined to avoid capture by the Redcoats and hell bent on revenge against those whose treachery put David’s life at risk. With danger on all sides this is a thrilling story nicely produced in a neatly sized edition.
If you love a good story, then look no further. Oxford Children's Classics bring together the most unforgettable stories ever told. They're books to treasure and return to again and again. When orphan David Balfour is betrayed by his Uncle Ebenezer, he finds himself imprisoned on the Covenant and bound for the Carolinas. But the ship hits some rocks and is wrecked. David is thrown overboard and washed up on the shore of a Scottish island. Together with fellow survivor, the wanted rebel, Alan Breck, David sets off across the treacherous highlands on a quest for justice ...and revenge!
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.
