Adventure · Historical
Kidnapped
Cheated by his uncle and sold onto a ship, young David Balfour escapes into the Scottish Highlands with a hunted rebel.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Cheated, shipped and shipwrecked
In 1751, after his father’s death, seventeen-year-old David Balfour walks to the House of Shaws to meet his uncle Ebenezer, the only family he has left. The house is half built and the uncle is a miser, and within days David is tricked aboard a ship bound for the Carolinas, to be sold as a laborer. At sea he meets Alan Breck Stewart, a proud, quick-tempered Highlander with a price on his head. Robert Louis Stevenson published the novel in 1886, three years after Treasure Island, and some readers like it even more.
Why learners do well with it
David narrates in a clear, honest voice, and much of the book is a long walk across Scotland with a companion. That gives you a vocabulary of landscape and hardship (hills, heather, rivers, rain, hunger, sleep) that repeats as the two men cross the country. The heart of the book is the friendship between a careful Lowland Whig and a reckless Highland Jacobite, and their quarrels about loyalty, pride and money are some of the best dialogue Stevenson wrote.
In the original, Alan and others speak a Scots-flavored English that trips up even native readers. Lower-level editions keep their personalities in plainer language, and at any level a tap gives you the meaning of a word or phrase in that sentence.
Which level to start at
B1. The plot is simple, but the politics behind it (Jacobites, clans, redcoats) make more sense with a little room. B2 brings back more of the Highland color. If you’ve read Treasure Island at A2 or B1, this is a natural next step.
Read next
- Treasure Island, Stevenson’s first great adventure
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, another man on the run across Scotland
- Moonfleet, smugglers and a cursed diamond in the same decade