Wavewalker

The International Bestseller
A Times Best Memoir of 2023

Wavewalker is grippingly vivid and pacey. An electrifying story about an extraordinary childhood, and Heywood tells it with remarkable clarity and assurance. This engrossing book pitches the reader into the highs and lows of a young life spent in the "Wavewalker School of the Sea."

"A seven-year-old girl on a seventy-foot yacht, for ten years, over fifty thousand miles of sailing," notes Simon Winchester. The Times describes it as an astonishing almost day-by-day account of a hazardous journey and its legacy.

This is a story of an epic childhood journey, so exciting and so shocking it is hard to know whether you're reading about a dream or a nightmare. Wavewalker is thrilling, horrifying, beautifully written – I couldn't put it down,' says Ed Balls.

Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs, and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time, and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children.

Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child deprived of safety, friendships, schooling, and occasionally drinking water. At seventeen, Suzanne earned an interview at Oxford University and returned to the UK.

From the bestselling author of What Does Jeremy Think?, Wavewalker is the incredible true story of how the adventure of a lifetime became one child's worst nightmare – and how her determination to educate herself enabled her to escape.

A classic memoir of childhood. This is a book that every parent should read to consider the consequences of their midlife crises, and every child should read to learn how to deal with impossible mums and dads, as well as boils and barnacles, says the Mail on Sunday, awarding it five stars.