Winter Holiday (Swallows And Amazons #4: Vintage Classics)

Description

Winter holidays can be just as fun as summer with the Swallows and Amazons! "'You know what it's like. Dark at teatime and sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.'" Or so Nancy thinks. Then the lake ices over completely and the Swallows and Amazons, along with Dick and Dorothea -- 'the D's' -- plan a race to find the North Pole. How will they reach it if they can't sail? By sledges of course! But when a blizzard blows up and there is a mix up about signals, the D's disappear into the Arctic night. Disaster looms. Can the Swallows and Amazons save their friends?"

Reviews

There is plenty of excitement, a little danger, a quality of thinking, planning and fun which is delightful and stimulating. "TLS" He makes a tale of adventure a handbook to adventure. "Observer""

Author description

ARTHUR 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 2,276 ft 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. 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.