Kidnapped

Kidnapped is a historical adventure novel by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in Young Folks magazine from May to July 1886. It was written as a boys' novel, and it is set in 1751, a few years after the Jacobite rising of 1745.

David Balfour goes to his uncle Ebenezer after his parents die, and the uncle, who wants the family estate for himself, arranges for the boy to be taken aboard a ship bound for the American colonies. David survives the voyage, a shipwreck and a stay on the island of Earraid before he meets Alan Breck Stewart, and the two of them end up fleeing across the Highlands accused of a murder.

Stevenson wrote the book at speed and based the flight on the real events of the Appin murder, using the geography of the country to give the chase its shape. It became one of the models for the escape thriller that followed it, and it is read both as an adventure and as a story about loyalty between two very different men.