Author:Daniel Defoe
Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resourcefulness and ingenuity in his soliatry life on a desert island and his rescue of Man Friday has been abridged and retold many times since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719. It even appeared recently in graphic-novel form. In 1968 Kathleen Lines determined to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly cutting Crusoe's long meditations, and compressing the relevant bits of THE FARTHER ADVENTURES into a neat Epilogue, so that readers learn what happened to Friday. The evocative engravings are reproduced from a mid-nineteenth-century edition published by Cassell, Petter & Gilpin.
Stands out in triumph. It is firm, intelligent, in tune with twentieth-century mentality and well-written
—— Times Literary SupplementQuite up to the best standards of its predecessors, and to all old Ransome devotees the return to the lake of the first novels gives an added pleasure
—— Glasgow HeraldThe Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.
—— Sir Philip Pullman