The books use adventure stories about sailing to provide action and structure amid developing themes of foster care, mental illness, disability and corrupt officialdom.

Meanwhile, interest among boat-mooring neighbours in a Suffolk pub sign originally from a warship captured in the Battle of Sole Bay in 1672 shows that historic animosity between the English and the Dutch hasn't entirely worked itself out.

The river Blackwater sparkles in the early summer sun and the weather is set fair for sailing, but the children Xanthe has come to teach are oddly fearful – as if they are in hiding too.

[7] Liam's home life is complicated; he struggles to protect his family against unseen dangers but a half-term trip up the Suffolk coast in the Chinese junk Strong Winds triggers a series of events.

In 2006, while working on a PhD thesis, Julia Jones decided to become a writer of adventure stories like the Swallows and Amazons series of Arthur Ransome she had read as a child.

"[5] Peter Willis, reviewing Voyage North for Yachting Monthly wrote "With Jones’s dense and dynamic writing and her unfettered imagination, plus its eager engagement with the social zeitgeist of our times, the series deserves to be recognised as on a par with Philip Pullman and very much a 21st-century classic of grown-up children’s literature.