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Overview
Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.
This edition of Kidnapped includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by R.L. Fisher.
Young, innocent David Balfour leaves his father's gravesite to claim an inhertitance--and finds himself in a nightmare war for his very life. Betrayed by his own family. Beaten unconscious. Stuffed into the hold of a ship manned by drunken murderers. Doomed to slavery or death.
But then Balfour's captors try to kill a renegade swordsman named Alan Breck--a lethal mistake. With blood-dripping swords, Alan and David battle their way to shore...but not to safety. Breck is a rebel fighting for a cause already lost; and David is falsely charge with assassination.
Wanted by kidnappers, terrorists and an army; trapped in a land of enemies; Alan and David are locked together in a desperate race across and entire nation, toward a slim chance for freedom, safety...
And David Balfour's revenge.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466804838 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/15/1991 |
| Series: | Tor Classics |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 320 KB |
About the Author
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850–1894) was born in Scotland. His many acclaimed works include Treasure Island and A Child's Garden of Verses.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.
Date of Birth:
November 13, 1850Date of Death:
December 3, 1894Place of Birth:
Edinburgh, ScotlandPlace of Death:
Vailima, SamoaEducation:
Edinburgh University, 1875Read an Excerpt
Introduction by Margot Livesey
I.
When I was growing up in Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson was the first author whom I knew by name, and he remains the only one whom I can truthfully claim to have been reading all my life. From an early age, my parents read to me from A Child's Garden of Verses, and I soon learned some of the poems by heart.
I have a little shadow
that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him
is more than I can see.
Perhaps I recognized, even then, Stevenson's unique gift for keeping a foot in two camps. While the poems vividly captured my childish concerns, somewhere in the margins shimmered the mystery of adult life. A few years later Kidnapped was the first chapter book I read, and I can still picture the maroon binding and the black-and-white drawings that illustrated David Balfour's adventures. At the age of seven, a book without pictures would have been out of the question, but, in fact, they turned out to be superfluous. I could imagine everything that happened just from the words on the page, although I must admit to the small advantage that the view from my bedroom window—bare hills, rocks, heather—was very much like the landscape of Kidnapped.
At first glance such early acquaintance might seem like a good omen for an author's reputation. In actuality, that Stevenson is so widely read by children has tended to make him seem like an author from who, as adults, we have little to learn. It is worth noting that his contemporaries would not have shared this prejudice. Nineteenth-century readers did not regard children's books as separate species. Stevenson's ownfather often reread The Parent's Assistant, a volume of children's stories, and Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, writes of staying up late to finish Treasure Island.
Like the shadow of his poem, Stevenson's reputation has waxed and waned at an alarming rate. He died in a blaze of hagiography, which perhaps in part explains the fury of later critics. F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition dismisses Stevenson (in a footnote, no less) as a romantic writer, guilty of fine writing, and in general Stevenson has not fared as well as his friend Henry James. People comment with amazement that Borges and Nabokov praised his novels. Still, his best work has remained in print for over a hundred years, and his is among that small group of authors to have given a phrase to the language: Jekyll and Hyde.
Besides our perception of Stevenson as a children's author, two other factors may have contributed to his ambiguous reputation. Although his list of publications is much longer than most people realize—he wrote journalism and travel pieces for money—he failed to produce a recognizable oeuvre, a group of works that stand together, each resonating with the others. In addition, the pendulum of literary taste has swung in a direction that Stevenson disliked and was determined to avoid: namely, pessimism. After reading The Portrait of a Lady he wrote to James begging him to write no more such books, and while he admired the early work of Thomas Hardy, he hated the darker Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The English writer John Galsworthy commented memorably on this aspect of Stevenson when he said that the superiority of Stevenson over Hardy was that Stevenson was all life, while Hardy was all death.
From the Paperback edition.
What People are Saying About This
"Crossley reads this tale as its author might have. Adept at the language of the region and times, Crossley deftly brings one of literature's best-known stories to the ears of contemporary listeners." —-AudioFile