Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
2006
First Published
4.21
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages
There were dozens of us on the ship, all ages, boys and girls, and we were all up on deck for the leaving of Liverpool, gulls wheeling and crying over our heads, calling good-bye, I thought they were waving good-bye. None of us spoke. It was a grey day with drizzle in the air, the great sad cranes bowing to the ship from the docks as we steamed past. That is all I remember of England! When orphaned Arthur Hobhouse is shipped to Australia after WW II he loses his sister, his country and everything he knows. The coming years will test him to his limits, as he endures mistreatment, neglect and forced labour in the Australian outback. But Arthur is also saved, again and again, by his love of the sea. And when he meets a nurse whose father owns a boat-building business, all the pieces of his broken life come together. Now, at the end of his life, Arthur has built a special boat for his daughter Allie, whose love of the sea is as strong and as vital as her father's. Now Allie has a boat that will take her to England solo, across the world's roughest seas, in search of her father's long-lost sister! Will the threads of Arthur's life finally come together?
Avg Rating
4.21
Number of Ratings
6,099
5 STARS
46%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Michael Morpurgo
Author · 138 books
Sir Michael Andrew Morpurgo, OBE, FRSL is the author of many books for children, five of which have been made into films. He also writes his own screenplays and libretti for opera. Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1943, he was evacuated to Cumberland during the last years of the Second World War, then returned to London, moving later to Essex. After a brief and unsuccessful spell in the army, he took up teaching and started to write. He left teaching after ten years in order to set up 'Farms for City Children' with his wife. They have three farms in Devon, Wales and Gloucestershire, open to inner city school children who come to stay and work with the animals. In 1999 this work was publicly recognised when he and his wife were invested a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to youth. In 2003, he was advanced to an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2004. He was knighted in the 2018 for his services to literature and charity. He is also a father and grandfather, so children have always played a large part in his life. Every year he and his family spend time in the Scilly Isles, the setting for three of his books.
