Robinson Crusoe

Defying his parents, Robinson Crusoe goes to sea. He is captured by pirates but escapes to Brazil.

He makes a fortune using slave labour to grow tobacco and sugar. He sails to Africa to bring back more slaves but is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Everyone else is drowned. For over twenty years he lives alone. He learns to hunt and fish and make shelter.

Then the cannibals arrive. Will this be the end of his adventure — or the chance to escape?

About the Author

Daniel Defoe was probably born in London in 1660 and we know little of his early life beyond his parentage - his father, James Foe, was a butcher - and that his childhood home was one of the few buildings in his area to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666. His adult life was eventful and saw Foe (who adopted the pen name Defoe in 1703) rise through the ranks as a merchant, gain notoriety for pamphleteering and flung into prison as a result, achieve renown for his journalism, and become a spy for the government. He was sixty when Robinson Crusoe, his first work of fiction, was published to great acclaim. Other novels followed, including Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana, and Defoe continued writing until his death in 1731.