THE SILVER TONGUE

The Silver Tongue: A Tale of Treasure Island

Every legend has a shadow. Every hero, a witness.

When Squire Trelawney set sail for Treasure Island, he believed he knew his crew. He was wrong.

Thomas Quint has spent twenty years at sea learning two things: how to keep accounts, and when to keep his mouth shut. Both skills make him invaluable to Long John Silver, the charismatic, dangerous, one-legged proprietor of Bristols Spy-Glass tavern — a man whose plans run deeper than any chart and whose loyalties shift like the tide. When Silver manoeuvres himself aboard the Hispaniola as ships cook, Quint goes with him, occupying the most uncomfortable position on the entire voyage: knowing too much to be innocent, and not enough to act.

He watches from the shadow as Silver charms a boy called Jim Hawkins. He listens through the stockade walls to the negotiations of men deciding who will live and who will not. He carries Silvers secrets across an ocean and onto an island that gives nothing back without a cost.

The Silver Tongue is the untold story of Robert Louis Stevensons immortal adventure — not the boys story, and not the villains, but the story of the man in between. Part historical thriller, part moral reckoning, and part portrait of one of literatures most enduring enigmas, it asks the question that Stevensons original never quite answered: what did the people closest to Long John Silver actually see in him, and why, knowing everything they knew, did they follow him anyway?

For readers who have always suspected that the most interesting person in any room is the one standing quietly at the back, watching.

"He was my employer and my villain and my curiosity and, in some fashion I was never quite able to define precisely, my friend. All four of these things simultaneously, which is, I think, as complicated as people generally get."

— Thomas Quint