The Runaways

Name: The Runaways
Rating: 4.23 (302 reviews)

by Victor Canning Book 1 in the The Smiler Trilogy series.

First published 1972

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4.1(302)

Fifteen-year-old Samuel “Smiler” Miles escapes from an approved school after being wrongly convicted of stealing a handbag. He intends to remain free until his father, a ship’s cook, returns and can help prove his innocence. During the same storm, a fallen tree allows Yarra, a cheetah at Longleat, to escape into the countryside. Their separate attempts to survive gradually bring boy and animal into the same landscape.

Smiler shelters in an empty cottage near Salisbury Plain, finds food and work without revealing his identity, and watches Yarra recover the instincts needed to live beyond captivity. The novel treats both fugitives with sympathy while showing the practical risks of rural survival. Its early-1970s setting also preserves approved schools, military training land and village life before mobile communication made prolonged disappearance far more difficult.