In the Library
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe, 1719
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 9 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 121k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
He cut a tall post into the sand and notched it once for every day, a calendar kept by a man with no one to keep time for. This is the texture of Daniel Defoe's island, and it turns out to be strangely gripping: a single castaway, a hatchet and some biscuit hauled from the wreck, and the slow, patient labour of staying alive and sane at once. Crusoe keeps a ledger of his blessings against his miseries in two neat columns, raises goats, learns after many failures to bake bread and fire a pot that will not crack. Defoe, who had himself been bankrupted and jailed, writes it all in the plain, unhurried voice of a ship's log, and makes the case that a self can be built the way a shelter is, plank by salvaged plank. Then, years in, a single bare footprint pressed into the sand, and the discovery that he is not alone frightens him more than the storm that wrecked him ever did.