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  • Published: 7 December 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099427223
  • Imprint: Red Fox
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $19.99

We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea




A timeless classic, beautifully rejacketed. One of twelve Arthur Ransome titles reissued this month

'Now Susan,' Mother said, 'And you too, John. No night sailing. No going outside the harbour. And back the day after tomorrow. Promise.'But promises can't always be kept. Within twenty-four hours John, Susan, Titty and Roger find themselves fighting a night gale in the treacherous waters of the North Sea, adrift and in the main shipping lanes. Suddenly, it's real adventure and only their sailing skills can help them now.

  • Published: 7 December 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099427223
  • Imprint: Red Fox
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884 and went to school at Rugby. He was in Russia in 1917, and witnessed the Revolution, which he reported for the Manchester Guardian.

After escaping to Scandinavia, he settled in the Lake District with his Russian wife where, in 1929, he wrote Swallows and Amazons. And so began a writing career which has produced some of the real children's treasures of all time. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book, Pigeon Post.

Ransome died in 1967. He and his wife Evgenia lie buried in the churchyard of St Paul's Church, Rusland, in the southern Lake District.

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Praise for We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea

Arthur Ransome's adventure books are an institution, and Christmas is the richer because of his invention, gravity, and solid matter

Times Literary Supplement

The most exciting of the whole Swallows and Amazon series

New Statesman

The seventh of the Arthur Ransome books about the Swallows and the Amazons, and I really think it is the best

The Sunday Times