The thrilling adventures of David Balfour are told by himself in this fast-paced narrative of kidnap, escape and a quest for revenge. Set against the rugged Scottish scenery which Stevenson evokes beautifully, the story ducks and dives to a most satisfying conclusion.
"Two sailors dragged me back from the side of the ship, and then a thunderbolt seemed to strike me on the back of the head. There was a great flash of fire, and then nothing but darkness…" After the death of his parents, young David Balfour is sent to stay with his mysterious Uncle Ebenezer. When David discovers a family secret that could change his life forever, he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. His only chance to escape is to follow a Highland warrior, Alan Breck, on a desperate and dangerous adventure.
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.
