Kidnapped

Name: Kidnapped
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

by Robert Louis Stevenson Book 1 in the David Balfour series.

First published 1886

Amazon

4.0(2)

Scotland, 1751. Newly orphaned David Balfour travels to the House of Shaws to claim his inheritance from his miserly uncle Ebenezer. Ebenezer arranges for him to be abducted aboard the Covenant and sold into servitude in the American colonies, but the ship takes on Allan Breck Stewart, a Jacobite soldier returning secretly from France. David and Allan survive mutiny and shipwreck before attempting to cross the Highlands together.

Their journey enters the political aftermath of the 1745 rising when Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure, the Crown factor known as the Red Fox, is shot near Appin. David has witnessed enough to know Allan did not fire the shot, yet both are hunted as suspects. Stevenson combines a coming-of-age adventure with the real Appin Murder, clan rivalry and post-Culloden repression, while making the fictional David’s moral choices a test of loyalty, justice and political identity.