"Stands out in triumph. It is firm, intelligent, in tune with twentieth-century mentality and well-written" Times Literary Supplement "Quite up to the best standards of its predecessors, and to all old Ransome devotees the return to the lake of the first novels gives an added pleasure" Glasgow Herald

Arthur Ransome was born in 1884. He was in Russia in 1917 and witnessed the Revolution, which he reported for the Manchester Guardian. After escaping to Scandinavia, he settled in the Lake District of England with his Russian wife where, in 1929, he wrote "Swallows and Amazon"s. Thus began a writing career that has produced some of the best children s literature of all time."