Kidnapped
A young man inherits nothing, is cheated out of it by an uncle, and is carried aboard a ship bound for the American colonies. Stevenson wrote the novel as a boys' adventure and gave it a historical spine: the Appin murder and the Highland clearances are real events, and the plot runs through them.
The friendship between David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart is the reason the book lasts. They disagree about almost everything, including loyalty, and the novel is honest about how much of the Highlands was already lost by 1751. The flight across the heather is one of the great sequences in adventure writing.
Public-domain status
First published in 1886. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, so this work has been free to republish there since 1965.
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