Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STELLA RIMINGTON
May 1914. Britain is on the eve of war with Germany. Richard Hannay
is living a quiet life in London, but after a chance encounter with a
mysterious stranger he stumbles into a hair-raising adventure - a
desperate hunt across the country and against the clock, pursued by
the police and a cunning, ruthless enemy. Hannay's life and the
security of Britain are in grave peril, and everything rests on the
solution to a baffling enigma: what are the thirty-nine steps?
John Buchan was born in Perth in 1875, the son of a Scottish
Presbyterian minister, and educated at Glasgow. He gained a first at
Oxford University, where he began writing, producing two volumes of
essays, four novels and two collections of stories and poems before the
age of twenty-five. He worked briefly as a lawyer, then served as a
private secretary in the colonial administration of South Africa after
the Boer War. During the war he worked both as a journalist and at
Britain's War Propaganda Bureau, eventually becoming Director of
Information. He published his most popular novel,
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, in 1915, and it has never since been out of print. In 1935 Buchan was
elevated to the peerage, becoming Baron Tweedmuir of Elsfield, and later
that year was appointed Governor General of Canada by King George V. He
died on 11 February 1940.
