DescriptionHow far would you go to find yourself? The lyrical, life-affirming novel from the bestselling author of Private Peaceful and War Horse.There were dozens of us on the ship, all up on deck for the leaving of Liverpool, gulls wheeling and crying over our heads, calling good-bye… That is all I remember of England.When six-year-old orphan Arthur Hobhouse is shipped to Australia after WWII he loses his sister, his country and everything he knows. Overcoming enormous hardships with fellow orphan Marty, Arthur is finally saved by the extraordinary people he meets and by his talent for boat-design and sailing. Now he has built a special boat for his daughter Allie – a solo yacht designed to carry her to England in search of his long-lost sister. Will the threads of Arthur’s life finally come together?I was there on the quayside to see Allie take her out for the first time, saw her dancing through the waves, and I knew I’d never built a finer boat.Reviews”Lyrical and moving, it is one of the former Children’s Laureate’s best books for years.” – Amanda Craig, The Times”His best book in years… I was completely hooked.” – Kate Kellaway, The Observer Review”A powerful story.” – The Guardian Children’s Books Supplement”Executed with Morpurgo’s distinctive flair. His language remains beautifully clean and clear.” – Waterstone’s Books Quarterly”[A] very satisfying read… The masterful writing makes the characters come to life on the page… I’m recommending this to adult friends as well as teenagers.” – Books for Keeps”Michael Morpurgo strikes gold… this is a life-rewarding novel.” – Angels & Urchins”This is storytelling at its best.” – Primary Times”Incredibly moving, harrowing and completely unputdownable. A first class story that brings history alive.” – My Child magazine”Completely unputdownable.” – Families MagazineAuthor BiographyMichael Morpurgo is one of Britain’s best loved writers for children with sales of over 35 million copies. He has written over 150 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize and the Whitbread Award. In 2005 he won the Blue Peter Book Award for his novel Private Peaceful, which was also adapted into an acclaimed stage play. His subsequent book, The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, spent an astonishing 20 weeks in the bestseller charts, and his enormous success has continued with his most recent novels, Alone on a Wide Wide Sea and Born to Run.Michael was Children’s Laureate from 2003 to 2005. The charity Farms for City Children, which he founded thirty years ago with his wife Clare, has now enabled over 60,000 children to spend a week living and working down on the farm. He was knighted in 2018 for services to literature and charity.Michael Morpurgo is, in his own words, “oldish, married with three children, and a grandfather six times over.” After schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury (one of which was horrible enough to inspire him to describe it obliquely in The Butterfly Lion), he went on to London University to study English and French, followed by a job in a primary school in Kent. It was there that he discovered what he wanted to do.“We had to read the children a story every day and my lot were bored by the book I was reading. I decided I had to do something and told them the kind of story I used to tell my kids – it was like a soap opera, and they focussed on it. I could see there was magic in it for them, and realised there was magic in it for me.”In 1976, Michael Morpurgo and his wife, Clare, started the charity Farms For City Children which aims to relieve the poverty of experience of young children from inner city areas by providing them with a week in which they work actively and purposefully on farms in the heart of the countryside. They now have three farms – Nethercott in Devon, Treginnis in Wales and Wick in Gloucestershire. “As a teacher I realised many children had little real contact with the world around them – to them the television was real. I wanted them to experience life at first hand.”