Arthur Ransome

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Swallows And Amazons

or Not Welcome At All

The Picts and the Martyrs

Great Northern?

Missee Lee

The Big Six

We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea

Secret Water

Coot Club

Peter Duck

Winter Holiday

Swallowdale

Swallows and Amazons

We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea

Pigeon Post

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A truly wonderful book by a gifted and now unforgivably neglected children's writer

In its own class, and wearing several gold stars for distinction. Pigeon Post stands head and shoulders above the average adventure book for and of children

There is plenty of excitement, a little danger, a quality of thinking, planning and fun in connection with a gold-mine. The ingenuity of this group of children is delightful and stimulating

‘Barbecued billygoats!’ 
 
Can you imagine finding gold? That’s just what the Swallows and Amazons and Dick and Dorothea decide to hunt for in the hills high above the lake. But it’s a hot and dry summer and water is in scarce supply. Worse still for the troubled campers, they have competition: Squashy Hat. Anybody can see he is a prospector. And talk about squashy hats! The children have never seen squashier. Just who is he and what sort of traps is he laying? Using pigeons to carry messages, braving dangerous mines and fires, the Swallows, Amazons and D’s Mining Company must stake their claim before their dreaded rival... 
 
Includes exclusive material: In ‘The Backstory’ you can test your knowledge of the book and learn all about homing pigeons! 
 
Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from The Jungle Book and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

WINNER OF THE FIRST EVER CARNEGIE MEDAL IN 1936.

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 2,276ft 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. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote: ''I have been often asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above . . . Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind's eye, could see the beloved sky-line of great hills beneath it. Swallows grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.'' 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.

Pigeon Post

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