South - Ernest Shackleton (Real Reads)

‘At 5 o’clock on the evening of November 21st, after the ice had drawn back like pall bearers at a funeral, Endurance slipped lower in the water, her stern pointing skywards. We stood in silence while she said her last farewell. A cacophony of cracking timber and rushing water signaled her end and then she was silent, slipping into the watery grave. The bravest ship, she had struggled to the bitter end and now she was gone. Endurance – well named.’ When his ship Endurance sinks in the icy Antarctic, Ernest Shackleton is left with the responsibility of getting his crew safely back home. Can they survive the crossing of dangerous ice floes and setting up camp on the remote Elephant Island? But nobody knows where they are unless somebody can sail the tiny lifeboat across eight hundred miles of the world’s most dangerous seas. Can it be done?

Real Reads are accessible texts designed to support the literacy development of primary and lower secondary age children while introducing them to the riches of our international literary heritage. Each book is a retelling of a work of great literature from one of the world’s greatest cultures, fitted into a 64-page book, making classic stories, dramas and histories available to intelligent young readers as a bridge to the full texts, to language students wanting access to other cultures, and to adult readers who are unlikely ever to read the original versions.

JOHN MACKENNA is the author of twenty three books – novels, short-story collections, memoir, poetry and biography – and a number of radio and stage plays. He is a winner of The Irish Times, Hennessy and Cecil Day-Lewis Awards. He is also a winner of a Jacobs Radio award for his documentary series on Leonard Cohen and a Worldplay Silver Medal (New York) for his radio play The Woman at the Window (RTÉ Radio 1). He teaches Creative Writing at Maynooth University and at The Hedge School on the Moone.