Action packed and compelling, Kidnapped is a classic adventure story involving danger and revealing great courage. David Balfour has to track down his uncle to seek his inheritance. But his uncle is not all that he seems. David is kidnapped and put aboard a ship to lead him to slavery. How he is helped to escape and find safety by Alan Breck, the daring young Jacobite rebel, and how the two of them survive and make good in the rough Scottish countryside is told in dramatic and thrilling detail.
This edition comes with a brilliant introduction by Alexander McCall Smith who tells us how he came to love this story and why it remains such a thrilling and exciting adventure in his mind. There's also lots of additional material at the end of the book including an author profile, a guide to who’s who plus many activities beyond the book.
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Kidnapped (with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith) Synopsis
When young David Balfour's father dies and leaves him in poverty, he tracks down his Uncle Ebenezer to seek his inheritance. But his uncle is a mean, nasty man with a dark family secret. David finds himself in terrible danger when he is kidnapped and taken prisoner on board a ship bound for slavery - he must escape.
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.
