Changes

|title=Silver: Return to Treasure Island

|author=Andrew Motion

|publisher=Jonathan Cape

|date=March 2012

|website=http://www.andrewmotion.co.uk

|summary=Adventure, pirates, buried treasure, love story, noble seamen and Long John Silver - if that doesn't whet your appetite, then nothing will.

}}

Even if you have not read Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 classic ''Treasure Island'', or you have read it a long time ago, the chances are that you will be broadly familiar with the story and in particular some of the rich characters he created because they have entered into the culture of our image of pirates. Before Johnny Depp convinced us that pirates looked like Keith Richards, it was the terrifying image of Long John Silver and his parrot, squawking 'pieces of eight', double dealing his way to buried treasure and the innocence of young narrator Jim Hawkins that conjures up what we think of in terms of pirate adventure. But Stevenson left some tantalizing threads to his tale, not least the fact that Silver made off with only the majority of the treasure and left the remaining silver behind together with three marooned pirates to fend for themselves. Setting the story 40 years after these events, Andrew Motion picks up the tale and has the offspring of Hawkins, in the form of his son also called Jim and Long John Silver's daughter Natty returning to collect the remaining bounty. Of course, it's never going to be that simple.