Michael Morpurgo · 2006 · sea

Michael Morpurgo's 2006 novel. After the Second World War, the orphaned Arthur Hobhouse is shipped from England to Australia as a child migrant, parted from his sister and raised through hardship in the outback before becoming a boatbuilder. A lifetime later his daughter Allie sets sail alone in the boat he built, voyaging single-handed from Australia back to England to close the circle of his life. The route runs out to Australia and all the way home again.

1. 1
   Liverpool

   As a small orphaned boy after the war, Arthur Hobhouse is put aboard a ship at Liverpool and sent halfway round the world to Australia, torn from his sister Kitty.

2. 2
   Sydney

   He grows up hard in the Australian outback and on the water, in time becoming a boatbuilder, and builds a fine wooden boat of his own before he dies.

3. 3
   Fowey

   His daughter Allie sails that boat single-handed out of Sydney and across the great oceans, around the bottom of the world, home at last to a Cornish harbour and the England her father lost.