Kidnapped

Newly orphaned at seventeen, David Balfour walks to the grim house of Shaws to claim his inheritance from his uncle Ebenezer — who first tries to murder him, then has him kidnapped aboard the brig Covenant to be sold into bondage across the sea. Shipwreck casts David ashore in the western Highlands of 1751, a Lowland boy adrift in a country still raw from the defeat of the Jacobite cause at Culloden.

There he falls in with Alan Breck Stewart, a swaggering, exiled Jacobite soldier the law would hang on sight. When the king's hated agent is shot dead on a lonely road through Appin, David — an innocent witness — is taken for an accomplice, and the two men become fugitives together, running south across moor and mountain with the redcoats always at their backs. Stevenson built the killing on a true crime, the Appin Murder of 1752, for which an innocent man was hanged; he gave his Highlander the name of the real prime suspect.

Kidnapped is a headlong adventure — a shipwreck, a siege, a chase through the heather — but its heart is the friendship that forms across the deepest divide of the age: Lowland Whig and Highland Jacobite, law and loyalty, two opposites who quarrel and very nearly part and yet cannot. Told in David's own Scots-inflected voice, with a geographer's fidelity to the country it crosses, it is one of the great historical romances in the English language.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book's composition, history, and craft, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.