Beginning aboard the SS Mantola, Dahl sets sail for Africa at the tender age of 22. He experiences the remnants of colonial British life, filled with eccentric characters, and is thrown into a world as bizarre and surprising as any you will find in his fiction. A great sense of peace and serenity seemed to surround these massive, slow-moving, gentle beasts. Their skin hung loose over their bodies like suits they had inherited from larger ancestors, with the trousers ridiculously baggy.”

Going Solo by Roald Dahl - Audiobooks on Google Play Going Solo by Roald Dahl - Audiobooks on Google Play

I'm giving this book 5 stars without having actually read it, but ya know what it's my review so I can do whatever I want (don't try and stop me)! I have a very personal relationship with Going Solo (one of my favorite books by one of my all-time favorite authors), so this review is going to be a bit personal and perhaps somewhat irrelevant. within the first 3rd of the book there was nudity on boats, a lion carrying a person, and a snake crawling into someone's house.Going Solo appeared towards the end of an extraordinarily fertile patch in his career when, with the support of his second wife, Felicity Crosland, and a collaborative editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Stephen Roxburgh, he wrote classics like The BFG and Matilda, with vivid illustrations by Quentin Blake.

Going Solo by Roald Dahl - Books on Google Play Going Solo by Roald Dahl - Books on Google Play

My Log Book records that on 17 April we lost Flight-Sergeant Cottingham and Flight-Sergeant Rivelon and both their aircraft. Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Wales of Norwegian parents. He spent his childhood in England and, at age eighteen, went to work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa. When World War II broke out, he joined the Royal Air Force and became a fighter pilot. At the age of twenty-six he moved to Washington, D.C., and it was there he began to write. His first short story, which recounted his adventures in the war, was bought by The Saturday Evening Post, and so began a long and illustrious career. We were fortunate, those of us who grew up in the 1980s. Almost every year there would be a new book by Roald Dahl which would be passed around at school and discussed with great seriousness. There were also playground arguments about his name: ‘It’s not Ronald, it’s Roald! Don’t you know anything?’ The next three days, 17, 18 and 19 April 1941, are a little blurred in my memory. The fourth day, 20 April, is not blurred at all. My Log Book records that from Eleusis aerodromeQuentin Blake has been drawing ever since he can remember. He taught illustration for over twenty years at the Royal College of Art, of which he is an honorary professor. He has won many prizes, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Eleanor Farjeon Award and the Kate Greenaway Medal, and in 1999 he was appointed the first Children’s Laureate. In the 2013 New Year’s Honours List he was knighted for services to illustration.