LoveReading Says
Prester John is Buchan's first adventure story and is comparable in style and pace to Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. Set in South Africa in 1900 it has a simple but compelling story which will keep you hooked to the pages from start to finish. From the eastern shores of Scotland to Southern Africa the reader is taken into an exciting but entirely credible world of adventure involving fabulous treasure, violence, double-dealing, a native uprising and the protagonist's eventual triumph over the forces of evil.
From the Introduction by Trevor Royle in Prester John:
Prester John is a wonderfully solid achievement. Not only did it give Buchan the confidence that he was a natural teller of tales but its fast-moving action looks forward to later adventure novels such as The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Huntingtower (1922). It was the prentice piece on which all his future fiction was constructed.
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Prester John Synopsis
South Africa, 1900. After his father dies, nineteen-year-old David Crawfurd is sent off to South Africa to earn his living as a storekeeper in the back of beyond. A strange encounter on the journey suggests that dark deeds and treacherous intrigues are afoot - all bound up with the mysterious primeval kingdom of Prester John. Written as a boys' adventure story and set mostly in South Africa (where Buchan had worked), Prester John was published in 1910 when Buchan was 35. It's a fast-moving thriller in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781846970641 |
| Publication date: |
13th August 2009 |
| Author: |
John Buchan |
| Publisher: |
Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited an imprint of Birlinn General |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Primary Genre |
Action Adventure
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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About John Buchan
John Buchan led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford. During his time there – ‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’ – he wrote two historical novels.
In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan – now Sir John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield - moved to Canada in 1935 where he had been appointed Governor-General.
Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. In 1928 he won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize for his biography of the Marquis of Montrose. Buchan’s distinctive thrillers – ‘shockers’ as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.
John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published. His last novel Sick Heart River was published posthumously in 1941.
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