Except, it seems, someone has been there before them. With no hope of rescue, the chance of getting home feels impossibly small. He and the three other children may be alive, but the jungle is a vast, untamed place.

If only he could land and look about him.Īs the plane crashes into the canopy, Fred is suddenly left without a choice. He has always dreamed of becoming an explorer, of making history and of reading his name amongst the lists of great discoveries. The boy sitting in the cockpit gripped his seat and held his breath as the plane roared and climbed into the arms of the sky.įrom his seat in the tiny aeroplane, Fred watches as the mysteries of the Amazon jungle pass by below him. Like a man-made magic wish the airplane began to rise.

Longlisted for The CILIP Carnegie Medal 2018 On one level it’s a gripping story of survival and the tenacity of the human spirit against all odds, but it’s also a hymn to hope, love and courage, delivered with all the warmth and wisdom we’ve come to expect from one of our most talented writers for children.Winner of the 2017 Costa Book Awards Children's Award

At the heart of the novel is how her four main characters – aspiring explorer Fred, gloriously spiky Con and Brazilian siblings Lila and Max – embark on a journey of self-discovery, coming to terms with their situation and finding the bravery and ingenuity they need. The early 20th-century setting disallows the pesky interference of modern technology, lending a timeless feel to the plot. The mystery deepens when the discovery of a map suggests they are not the first humans to find this place. But it’s also a place of wonder: Rundell’s rich, descriptive prose will transport her young readers to a mesmerising world where they can swim with river dolphins, eat a tarantula and discover a ruined city. They are alone and in absolute peril, without food or water, at the mercy of the ferocious jungle. Readers are plunged, quite literally, into a wildly exciting adventure when four children crash-land hundreds of miles from civilisation after their pilot suffers a heart attack. F rom the whimsical streets of Victorian Paris in Rooftoppers to the frozen white plains of Russia in The Wolf Wilder, Katherine Rundell conjures an extraordinary sense of place in her novels, no more so than in the lush Amazon rainforest of her latest.

The Explorer by Katherine Rundell