Escape to the River Sea

Beautiful and full of adventure, Escape to the River Sea is Emma Carroll’s compelling novel inspired by Eva Ibbotson’s bestselling, classic masterpiece, Journey to the River Sea.

’Unputdownable storytelling. I loved it.’ - Hilary McKay, Costa Award-winning author of The Skylark’s War

In 1946, Rosa Sweetman, a young Kindertransport girl, is longing for her family to claim her. The war in Europe is over and she is the only child left at Westwood, a rambling country estate in the north of England, where she’d taken refuge seven years earlier.

The arrival of a friend of the family, Yara Fielding, starts an adventure that will take Rosa deep into the lush beauty of the Amazon rainforest in search of jaguars, ancient giant sloths and somewhere to belong. What she finds is Yara’s lively, welcoming family on the banks of the river and, together, they face a danger greater than she could ever have imagined.

Featuring places and characters known and loved by fans of Journey to the River Sea (including, among others, Maia, Finn, Miss Minton and Clovis) this spectacular new chapter in the story tells of the next generation and the growing threats to the Amazon rainforest that continue to this day.

Once told by poet Ted Hughes her writing was ’dangerous’, it took Emma Carroll twenty years of English teaching and a life-changing cancer diagnosis to feel brave enough to give her dream of being an author a try. Nowadays she is the bestselling author and the ’Queen of Historical Fiction’ (BookTrust). She has been nominated for and the winner of numerous national, regional and schools awards - including the Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award, Branford Boase, CILIP Carnegie Medal, Young Quills, Teach Primary and the Waterstones Book Prize. Emma’s home is in the Somerset hills with her husband and two terriers. She still can’t believe her luck that she gets to write dangerous books for a living.

Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels have been published around the world. Journey to the River Sea won the Smarties Gold Medal and was shortlisted for both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. Some of her other young fiction titles include The Secret of Platform 13, Which Witch? and The Great Ghost Rescue. Eva died peacefully in October 2010 at the age of eighty-five.