Going Solo

by Roald Dahl (Author), Quentin Blake (Illustrator)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.25

  Going Solo tells of how, when he grew up, Roald Dahl left England for Africa and a series of daring and dangerous adventures began. From tales of plane crashes to surviving snake bites, read all about Roald Dahl's life before becoming the world's number-one storyteller. This book is full of exciting and strange things - some funny, some frightening, all true. 'I have only written about those moments that I consider memorable' - Roald Dahl Roald Dahl, the best-loved of children's writers, was born in Wales of Norwegian parents. After school in England he went to work for Shell in Africa. He began to write after a monumental bash on the head , sustained as an RAF pilot in World War II. Roald Dahl died in 1990. Quentin Blake is one of the best-known and best-loved children's illustrators and it's impossible now to think of Roald Dahl's writings without imagining Quentin Blake's illustrations.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.25

  'They didn't think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton; and they were apparently astounded when they came upon my still-breathing body, lying in the sand near by'. In 1938, Roald Dahl was fresh out of school and bound for his first job in Africa, hoping to find adventure far from home. However, he got far more excitement than he bargained for when the outbreak of the Second World War led him to join the RAF. His account of his experiences in Africa, crashing a plane in the Western Desert, rescue and recovery from his horrific injuries in Alexandria, and many other daring deeds, recreates a world as bizarre and unnerving as any he wrote about in his fiction.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1986

  $4.35

  Everyone who has entered 'the brilliantly colored, sometimes grotesque and sometimes magical world Dahl has conjured up in Boy', as Claire Tomalin described it in the Sunday Times, will be longing to learn what happens to the supreme storyteller next in Going Solo - and they will not be disappointed. It is a tale of deadly snakes on the ground and daring deeds in the air, of African safaris and encounters with the Hun, told with all the irresistible appeal which has made Roald Dahl one of the world's best-loved writers both for adults and for children. In the autumn of 1938 Dahl sets off to work in Africa aboard a paint-peeling tub full of the dottiest fellow passengers imaginable. He falls in love with Tanganyika: a wonderful, beautiful, exciting country, plentifully covered with exotic wild animals - some of them best kept at a considerable distance. The green and black mambas, Dahl learns, make tricky opponents. Trickier still are the human predators, the Huns, who are trying to take over the world. Britain declares war on Germany and after temporary duty as an army officer, Dahl signs up with the RAF. It is impossible to imagine a more exciting or vivid account of what it was like to learn to fly a fighter plane and take it up to dice with the enemy. A disastrous detour delays him for six months, but then, with all six foot six inches scrunched into the cockpit like a pretzel, young Dahl eventually takes his place in the heavily depleted 80 Squadron, consisting of a mere fifteen fighter pilots and their Hurricanes who have been ordered to provide cover for the entire British Expeditionary Force in Greece. In Dahl's case this insanely doomed venture is undertaken with minimal flying experience and no combat training whatsoever. How close we came to never meeting Charlie and his Chocolate Factory, Danny, the BFG, and Uncle Oswald and others will soon be apparent. If you want to discover how a snake-man avoids a poisonous bite, what to do if you find yourself in the mouth of a lion and where Rudolph Valentino comes into it all, just plunge into the adventurous pages of Going Solo. As Hazel Rochman in the New York Times Book Review declared of Roald Dahl's Boy: 'the autobiographical stories are as frightening and funny as his fiction'. What could be higher praise than that?