I sing the eagle. "Bone of the Cloud. The Clashing Rock. The Hard Darkness." It hangs above the grave mound. I sing, dreaming...

William Buckley was transported to Australia in 1801. He escaped and lived as an Aborigine for thirty-one years. In this visionary novel, Alan Garner is true to William the Cheshire bricklayer and William the Aboriginal spiritual leader, as William is true to his fate. The result is extraordinary.

Alan Garner was born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934 and grew up in Alderly Edge, where his father's family had lived for more than three hundred years. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Magdelen College, Oxford, after which he began writing his first novel,The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, at the age of twenty-two. He is renowned as one of Britain's outstanding writers for young adults and has won many prizes for his writing. In 2001 he was awarded the OBE for services to literature.

Based on a true story, Strandloper tells the extraordinary tale of a nineteenth-century Englishman who, having been sentenced and transported to Australia, escaped to live among the Aborigines for thirty years.