A young Englishman rejects the safe life his father planned for him and runs away to sea.

Storms, captivity and slavery fail to cure his hunger for adventure. Then another voyage ends in catastrophe.

His ship is destroyed, and he awakens on a remote island—the only survivor.

With no rescue in sight, he must salvage what he can and carve a life from the wilderness.

Days become years. Years become decades.

Then, after more than twenty years alone, he discovers something impossible:

A single human footprint in the sand.

Someone else is on the island.

But do they offer salvation—or something far more terrifying?

This is *Robinson Crusoe* by Daniel Defoe.

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I'm Roger Braveheart, and this is the TWIG 74 podcast — thanks for hanging out with me.

Here's the deal: I take the big, famous classics and retell them in a way that's easy to follow, but still keeps all the tension, the atmosphere and the feeling that made people fall in love with these books in the first place. Think of it as a free audiobook, just a lot shorter.

Listen properly from start to finish if you fancy it, or just stick it on in the background while you drive, do the washing up, wind down before bed, or get on with whatever else your day's throwing at you. Totally up to you.

Now, a quick bit of honesty. This is a summarised version. Most episodes come in at around the sixty-minute mark, give or take, depending on how long and how complicated the original book is. The full text of a book like this would take you many, many hours to get through. I did experiment with squeezing things into thirty minutes, but too much good stuff ended up on the cutting room floor, so sixty it is.

My job is to take a sprawling, wonderfully detailed novel and trim it down without losing the moments that matter — the turning points, and that slow, creeping sense of unease that builds as the story goes on.

And everything you'll hear comes straight from Daniel Defoe's own text. Not the films, not the TV versions, not the stage adaptations that love shuffling events around or inventing whole new bits for dramatic effect. Just the book.

New episodes land at least once a week, on Sundays, so you've got something ready to go for the working week ahead.

If you'd like to get in touch, the show's email is twig74@mailo.com. I genuinely love hearing from you — feedback, thoughts, or suggestions for classic books you'd like me to tackle on a future episode. Send them over.

Right then. Enough from me. Let's set sail.