Library Journal
Another hot new series from Penguin, "Great Books for Boys" offers a handful of top adventure stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Each volume sports a nice vintage-looking cover to complete the spell. Great fun (and girls can read them, too!).
—Michael Rogers
AudioFile
Frederick Davidson’s voice is properly sardonic, and his supercilious British articulation is just right. The story’s extended chase scene inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same name.”
Telegraph (London)
Buchan’s technique as a writer is simple enough and well displayed in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He understood that in a thriller…what matters above all is to keep the reader focused on what is going to happen next…It doesn’t matter that the reader has no clue where he is being taken or, when he gets there, how the thing happened as it did. All that matters is that once you’ve started, you can’t put the book down.”
author of A History of Warfare John Keegan
It is the dimension of the mysterious that makes Buchan’s writing so unfailingly compelling.”
An officer on the front in World War I
It is just the kind of fiction for here. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.”
From the Publisher
"Lethal, spare, clean and contemporary." —Guardian
