LoveReading4Kids Says
LoveReading4Kids Says
Volume 7 in the Strong Winds series
Voyage North, the seventh and final instalment of Julia Jones’ Strong Winds series, is a thoroughly modern, inclusive adventure. It will also appeal to adult readers who love immersive, thought-provoking stories, taking its scope beyond an exclusively teenage audience.
To set the scene for this novel, the series is underpinned by a love of the sea and the freedom to be had from sailing. It’s also partly inspired by the writer pondering how Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons characters would have fared in the 21st -century — an undeniably intriguing springboard.
Timely issues around the environment and political power are also addressed through the characters and action — Voyage North is set in 2012 as the new president of Russia takes measures to increase his power, just as the hero, Donny, voyages to the Arctic Circle on an oligarch’s super-yacht with a container of toxic waste. Driven by a real sense of quest and urgency, his journey is nothing but thrilling and thought-provoking.
Voyage North, and the previous books in the Strong Winds series, is available to buy at goldenduck.co.uk
Joanne Owen
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About
Strong Winds : Voyage North Synopsis
It’s the summer of 2012. In Russia, the newly-elected President is tightening his grip on power while the UK focusses on preparations for the Olympics.
Donny has dropped out of school, left Strong Winds, and is heading north on an oligarch’s superyacht with a canister of toxic waste. His journey will take him across the Arctic Circle and into the Barents Sea. Here he may find answers to questions that have troubled him all his life — and others which he has never thought to ask.
But who will he meet on the way and can he ever return to the life he has left behind?
This is the final adventure in a series which has appealed to many adult readers as well as to older children.
Voyage North, and the previous books in the Strong Winds series, is available to buy at goldenduck.co.uk
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781899262540 |
| Publication date: |
6th October 2022 |
| Author: |
Julia Jones |
| Illustrator: |
Claudia Myatt |
| Publisher: |
Golden Duck (UK) Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
308 pages |
| Series: |
Strong Winds series |
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Press Reviews
Julia Jones Press Reviews
‘An impressive finale to this unique series’ - Peter Willis, Nancy Blackett Trust
Author
About Julia Jones
Julia Jones as a child, steering Peter Duck, the boat bought from Arthur Ramsome that inspired his classic Swallows and Amazons.
When Julia Jones was three years old her parents bought Peter Duck, Arthur Ransome’s former yacht. Julia slept in the place that had been designed for Ransome to store his typewriter and it wasn’t long before she was reading her way through the Swallows and Amazons series. Boats and books have been part of her life ever since. 
As an adult she founded and ran a village bookshop and developed a local publishing list for older readers. She became close friends with Joyce Allingham, sister of Essex detective novelist Margery Allingham, and has written and edited three biographical works connected with the Allingham family with the fourth, Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, scheduled for publication in 2012. The Salt-Stained Book was her first novel for younger readers and is also enjoyed by adults. Followed up by A Ravelled Flag, the Strong Winds trilogy is concluded with Ghosting Home, out in July 2012. Julia has five children and lives in Essex and Suffolk with her partner, Francis Wheen. In 1999 they re-purchased Peter Duck.
CLICK HERE to read an article by Julia Jones, which was inspired in part by Arthur Ransome’s sailing adventures and in particular by Peter Duck, the boat which she was brought up on and which had previously been owned by Arthur Ransome.
More About Julia Jones
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The Strong Winds series has been part of Julia Jones’s life since first she sat beside Alton Water in Suffolk in 2006 watching her youngest children learning to sail.
She noticed how naturally some children take to the water and what freedom and confidence it can offer to those who are given the chance. At that time she was also feeling angry at a particular injustice affecting a mother and child and was increasingly aware of the way official State powers can come down hard on people least able to resist.
As she enjoyed exploring the Suffolk and Essex rivers on her childhood yacht Peter Duck, formerly owned by Arthur Ransome she wondered how his Swallows and Amazons series characters would have coped in the 21st century. How would they have managed without financial security, self-confidence and stable family backgrounds?
It took until 2011 for the first novel, The Salt-Stained Book, to be published. Then, what was planned as a trilogy became a series as the younger characters from the early books demanded their own adventures. The teenage heroes and heroines of the Strong Winds stories challenge disadvantage and disability to sail their way out of oppressive and dangerous situations, which are often rooted in the feuds and warfare of the past.
But even in fiction time, children grow up. Voyage North is the last Strong Winds book. There are nods to Great Northern, Arthur Ransome’s last Swallows and Amazons story, but this is a book for today, dramatizing issues of environmental concern and political conflict. It leaves the East Coast of England for the Arctic North where Presidential power politics turn adventure story into thriller.
