Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpugo

AZ: "Orphaned in WWII, Arthur is separated from his sister and sent to the other side of the world. There his extraordinary journey continues as he and his friend Marty survive brutal captivity on a working farm, find a new family with the eccentric Aunty Meg and her animals, and discover their talent for designing yachts. Sixty years later, Arthur's daughter Allie sets sail single-handed in a yacht designed by her father, determined to find his long-lost sister in England. Can family love stretch across time and the vastness of the oceans? And will the threads of Arthur's life finally come together?"

This book is split into two parts, the memoir of Arthur Hobhouse as a boy who is shipped to Australia in 1947 and his daughter Allie's account of her single handed yacht journey from Australia to the UK in 2005. It is hard to believe that the memoirs are not genuine, Arthur's experience of being ripped from his family (his sister Kitty), his home and his country and sent without any consultation to an alien country is heart rending and made me so angry, but Morpugo also captures 18-year-old Allie's voices, those of her emails and those of her own thoughts, utterly convincingly.