The Runaways
(Smiler Trilogy, Book 1)
Genre
Children’s Classic Fiction
Author
Victor Canning
About the Book
On a night of wild storms, two troubled figures escape from captivity.
Description
On a night of wild storms, two troubled figures escape from captivity. One is a 15-year-old
boy, Samuel Miles, a.k.a. ‘Smiler’, wrongly convicted of theft and sent to a young
offenders institution. The other is a cheetah, Yarra, a restless resident of Longleat Wildlife
Park.
Both are in danger from the outside world – and each other – but somehow their lives
become inextricably bound up as they fight for survival on the edge of Salisbury Plain.
A fast-moving and compassionate adventure story, The Runaways is the first book in
Victor Canning’s classic children’s trilogy.
Reviews of the Smiler Trilogy
‘Victor Canning is one of the world’s finest story-tellers’ Good Housekeeping
A delightful tale by a brilliant thriller writer’ Daily Mirror
‘Smiler proves himself to be a resourceful, resilient and very likeable leading character.’
Dan Smith, author of Big Game and Boy X
‘No spoilers but it left me a wreck and soon afterwards I realised the power books and
authors had to make us feel deep emotions.’ R.W.R McDonald, author of The Nancys
Author biography
Victor Canning was a prolific writer throughout his career, which began young: he had sold
several short stories by the age of nineteen and his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers His
England (1934) was published when he was twenty-three. It proved to be a runaway
bestseller. Canning also wrote for children: his trilogy The Runaways was adapted for US
children’s television
Other titles in the Smiler Trilogy
Flight of the Grey Goose The Painted Tent
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