LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Voyage North, the seventh and final instalment of Julia Jones’ Strong Winds series, is a thoroughly modern, inclusive adventure. It will also appeal to adult readers who love immersive, thought-provoking stories, taking its scope beyond an exclusively teenage audience.
To set the scene for this novel, the series is underpinned by a love of the sea and the freedom to be had from sailing. It’s also partly inspired by the writer pondering how Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons characters would have fared in the 21st -century — an undeniably intriguing springboard.
Timely issues around the environment and political power are also addressed through the characters and action — Voyage North is set in 2012 as the new president of Russia takes measures to increase his power, just as the hero, Donny, voyages to the Arctic Circle on an oligarch’s super-yacht with a container of toxic waste. Driven by a real sense of quest and urgency, his journey is nothing but thrilling and thought-provoking.
Voyage North, and the previous books in the Strong Winds series, is available to buy at goldenduck.co.uk
Joanne Owen
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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
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781899262540 |
| Publication date: |
6th October 2022 |
| Author: |
Julia Jones |
| Publisher: |
Golden Duck (UK) Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Primary Genre |
Action Adventure
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| Other Genres: |
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Press Reviews
Julia Jones Press Reviews
‘An impressive finale to this unique series’ - Peter Willis, Nancy Blackett Trust
Author
About Julia Jones
Julia Jones was born in Woodbridge Suffolk in 1954 and spent much of her childhood on board Peter Duck on the River Deben and elsewhere. She read Arthur Ransome's adventure stories as she lay in the quarterberth that had originally been designated as an area where he might store his typewriter. Like many female Ransome fans she could never quite make up her mind whether she wanted to be capable, swashbuckling Captain Nancy Blackett or sensitive, imaginative Able-seaman Titty.
She was however perfectly certain that she wanted to be the heroine of every pony book ever written and so was delighted when her parents moved to the family farm in Essex and she was allowed to own a particularly slow and stubborn wall-eyed pony on whom she dreamed about jumping five barred gates and returning home smothered in red rosettes.
The pony dream proved resilient. It lasted until she had married a farmer, acquired a succession of speedier and more co-operative horses and ridden in a point-to -point race. Meanwhile she had read English at Bristol University - specialising in Old and Middle English, as appropriate to someone who had grown up so near the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo. When babies began displacing the horses, Julia realised that books were the common factor in all her enthusiasms. She opened a bookshop in the Essex village of Ingatestone and spent many happy hours with her children reading their way through the profits.
Bookselling developed into small scale local publishing and Julia discovered that Margery Allingham, who she admired hugely as a detective novelist, had also lived in Essex and written The Oaken Heart an autobiographical account of the early years of the Second World War. Julia re-issued this under her own imprint in1988. This was the beginning of a close friendship with Margery's sister Joyce Allingham who was still living in the village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex. Joyce gave Julia complete freedom to rummage through the Allingham family papers as she researched Margery's life for the biography published in 1991. Then, as Joyce realised she was hearning the end of her own life, she gave Julia all her father, Herbert Allingham's papers.
Julia meanwhile had met Francis and added two more children to her collection. She began working part time as a OFSTED lay inspector and increasingly full-time as a community organiser for the the WEA. This was absorbingly interesting but lacked the direct contact with books that is the focal point of Julia's life. After Joyce Allingham died in 2001, Julia used her legacy to study the mass of papers that are the record of Herbert Allingham's working life. Allingham was a fiction-writer and by the time Julia had finally dotted the last footnote in her PhD thesis Family Fictions in 2006 she realised that that was what she too wanted to be. Not a writer of melodramatic sagas but a writer of adventure stories, like those Swallows and Amazons tales she had read on Peter Duck so long ago. The Adventures of Margery Allingham has been republished, followed by new editions of Philip Allingham's Cheapjack and Margery's The Oaken Heart. Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, her account of Herbert Allingham's working life is scheduled for publication in 2012. Best of all was the publication of The Salt-Stanied Bookin June 2011, followed in November by volume Two, A Ravelled Flag.
Meanwhile five grandchildren have somehow appeared on the scene.
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