Shirley Burgess

Stories of Adventure & Misadventure Shirley Burgess

Stories of Adventure and Misadventure is a collection of diverse narratives telling of unexpected perils that families or individuals have to deal with, such as: sheltering from a bushfire, a murder mystery that a postman discovers on his rounds, someone thrown into an unexpected divorce, brave rescues from dogs and a hazardous escape from high up in the north tower after the plane had struck it in 9/11. In this tale, our protagonist is blind! There are several stories where the heroes are man's best friend. Dogs have won this term by giving us unstinting love, their only reward being a pat or perhaps best of all, a boisterous play with them. In other words, to show some love back, and yet they are capable of saving our lives. How's that for a friend? As Josh Billings put it, 'A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than himself.' Among the stories is an account showing how Sir Nicholas Winton rescued over six hundred children in Czechoslovakia before the advance of the cruel Nazi regime, told through the eyes of two fictitious children's characters. All the stories are designed to be full of action from the first sentence to the last. These sixteen are taken from a collection of 89 stories by the author when she was in her mid-eighties and she enjoyed writing them very much.