Camille and Madeleine along with their friends Marguerite and Sophie are waiting excitedly for their cousins to arrive for the Summer holidays. The children fill their days building cabins, having picnics and games of hide and seek but things nearly go wrong when Sophie, hiding in an hollowed out tree trunk but is unable to climb out. But things really get exciting when Sophie's mother and cousin Paul unexpectedly return, it turns out they had escaped the shipwreck in which they were thought to have drowned and had made their way to a foreign land! The children are enthralled by the Crusoe-like tales of survival and adventure.
Author Biography
Stephanie Smee is a translator into English of all things literary and French. Having worked as a lawyer in Sydney and London, Stephanie happily traded in a legal career for a return to her linguistic calling. After several years as a legal translator, she left the world of financing documents behind and made her literary translation debut with a new English translation of the Countess de Segur's Fleurville Trilogy published in 2010 by Simon & Schuster (Australia). The Trilogy includes the perenially popular Sophie's Misfortunes, first published in France in 1858 and in print ever since. Her new translation of another of the Countess' favourites, Monsieur Cadichon: Memoirs of a Donkey was published at the end of 2011.