In the Library
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 34
- Length
- Length 68k 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.
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— / Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
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.
If you like this, try
King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
Haggard wrote it on a bet that he could beat Treasure Island, and it carries the same old map, the same hidden fortune and the same perilous road to reach it.
£1.99
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Dumas sends a wronged sailor to an island treasure buried by a dying man's secret, the same thrill of gold and vengeance on the open Mediterranean.
£1.99
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Defoe does the same castaway trick a century and a half earlier, but leaves his hero alone on the island instead of surrounded by pirates.
£1.99
About the book
A blind beggar taps his stick along the road to the Admiral Benbow Inn carrying a black spot for an old sea dog who keeps a chest beneath his bed, and a boy named Jim Hawkins is about to inherit a map. Robert Louis Stevenson serialised this novel in 1881 in a magazine for boys, drawing the chart first and letting the story uncoil from its coastline. Long John Silver runs the apple barrel, his parrot on his shoulder and his soft murderous courtesy overheard one night through the staves. Treasure Island invented the sea-chest, the black spot, the X on the map, and the morally vertiginous pirate who is charming precisely because he cannot be trusted. Every adventure novel since has sailed in its wake.