Winter Holiday

     'You know what it's like. Dark at teatime and sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.'

     Or so Nancy thinks. Then the lake ices over completely and the Swallows and Amazons, along with Dick and Dorothea -- 'the D's' -- plan a race to find the North Pole. How will they reach it if they can't sail? By sledges of course! But when a blizzard blows up and there is a mix up about signals, the D's disappear into the Arctic night. Disaster looms. Can the Swallows and Amazons save their friends?

Arthur Ransome was born in 1884. He was in Russia in 1917 and witnessed the Revolution, which he reported for the Manchester Guardian. After escaping to Scandinavia, he settled in the Lake District of England with his Russian wife where, in 1929, he wrote Swallows and Amazons. Thus began a writing career that has produced some of the best children’s literature of all time.