Voyage North Synopsis
It’s the summer of 2012. In Russia, the newly-elected President is tightening his grip on power while the UK focusses on preparations for the Olympics.
Donny has dropped out of school, left Strong Winds, and is heading north on an oligarch’s superyacht with a canister of toxic waste. His journey will take him across the Arctic Circle and into the Barents Sea. Here he may find answers to questions that have troubled him all his life — and others which he has never thought to ask.
But who will he meet on the way and can he ever return to the life he has left behind?
This is the final adventure in a series which has appealed to many adult readers as well as to older children.
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The Strong Winds series has been part of Julia Jones’s life since first she sat beside Alton Water in Suffolk in 2006 watching her youngest children learning to sail.
She noticed how naturally some children take to the water and what freedom and confidence it can offer to those who are given the chance. At that time she was also feeling angry at a particular injustice affecting a mother and child and was increasingly aware of the way official State powers can come down hard on people least able to resist.
As she enjoyed exploring the Suffolk and Essex rivers on her childhood yacht Peter Duck, formerly owned by Arthur Ransome she wondered how his Swallows and Amazons series characters would have coped in the 21st century. How would they have managed without finan-cial security, self-confidence and stable family backgrounds? It took until 2011 for the first novel, The Salt-Stained Book, to be published. Then, what was planned as a trilogy became a series as the younger characters from the early books demanded their own adventures. The teenage heroes and heroines of the Strong Winds stories challenge disadvantage and disability to sail their way out of oppressive and dangerous situations, which are often rooted in the feuds and warfare of the past.
But even in fiction time, children grow up. Voyage North is the last Strong Winds book. There are nods to Great Northern, Arthur Ransome’s last Swallows and Amazons story, but this is a book for today, dramatizing issues of environmental concern and political conflict. It leaves the East Coast of England for the Arctic North where Presidential power politics turn adventure story into thriller.
Voyage North, and the previous books in the Strong Winds series, is available to buy at goldenduck.co.uk
