Five Weeks in a Balloon (Annotated with Biography of Verne and Plot Analysis)


Book Description

Five Weeks in a Balloon was Jules Verne’s first published novel – he had adapted it from a work of non-fiction at the suggestion of his editor, Jules Hetzel. The novel was published in 1863, before successful balloon-air flight was accomplished. The story is pure adventure and typically Verne. It is not without its drawbacks – it is unpolished compared to some of Verne’s later works and the racism is difficult for today’s readers to accept. As a first adventure story, it was a testament as to what was to come from Verne – proving his publisher Hetzel had backed a winner. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.




Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Annotated with Biography of Verne and Plot Analysis)


Book Description

Some critics claim that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in 1870, is Jules Verne’s masterpiece. The novel is narrated by Professor Pierre Aronnax of the Paris Museum of Natural History. It is set in the year 1866 (Verne was already working on the manuscript at that time) and the world of the sea is in the news with the supposed sightings of a sea monster that is much too large and fast to be a whale. When a boat is damaged, apparently by the sea monster, Aronnax, while on a researching assignment in New York is asked by the United States government to help track down the monster. Aronnax (illustrations of Aronnax in the original edition look very much like Verne) takes his loyal Belgian valet (Conseil) with him – both Aronnax and Conseil are men of science – cool, rational, and possessing encyclopaedic knowledge of the sea. Ned Land serves as their foil – a passionate and foolhardy harpooner from Canada. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.




Around the World in Eighty Days (Annotated with Biography of Verne and Plot Analysis)


Book Description

Around the World in Eighty Days was published in 1873 and features Phileas Fogg as the protagonist. Fogg, a noble Londoner who lived on Savile Row, had made a wager at the Reform Club, for £20,000 (worth over a million pounds in 21st century value) that he could travel around the world in eighty days. Fogg is a very careful and precise man who has just fired his manservant for bringing him shaving water that was two degrees colder than he asked for. Fogg has a new valet, Jean Passepartout, a young Frenchman, who is looking forward to a quiet life with Phileas. Around the World in Eighty Days is Verne at his most fun – there was plenty of comic relief in the novel. He was able to use his own experience of recent travels to provide background for the narrative. The book was finished under a punishing deadline Verne set for himself – not unlike Fogg’s deadline for circumnavigating the world. The book was the most successful in terms of sales during the author’s lifetime, selling 108,000 copies before his death. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.




The Mighty Orinoco


Book Description

Written in 1898, and part of Jules Verne's famous series "Voyages Extraordinaires, " this fantastic tale a young man's search for his father along Venezuela's then-uncharted Orinoco River contains all the ingredients of a classic Verne scientific-adventure storyQas well as a unique feminist twist.







Around the World in 80 Days


Book Description




Lighthouse at the End of the World


Book Description

In 1859, three sailors arrive on an isolated island to man a new lighthouse at the wreck-prone tippy tip of South America. They soon discover a band of egregious criminals, led by dangerous evildoer Kongre, who have been tricking ships into running aground, killing the survivors and taking the loot. When two lighthouse men go to assist a ship and are killed, serious trouble ensues.




The Begum's Millions


Book Description

Verne's first cautionary tale about the dangers of science — first modern and corrected English translation. When two European scientists unexpectedly inherit an Indian rajah's fortune, each builds an experimental city of his dreams in the wilds of the American Northwest. France-Ville is a harmonious urban community devoted to health and hygiene, the specialty of its French founder, Dr. François Sarrasin. Stahlstadt, or City of Steel, is a fortress-like factory town devoted to the manufacture of high-tech weapons of war. Its German creator, the fanatically pro-Aryan Herr Schultze, is Verne's first truly evil scientist. In his quest for world domination and racial supremacy, Schultze decides to showcase his deadly wares by destroying France-Ville and all its inhabitants. Both prescient and cautionary, The Begum's Millions is a masterpiece of scientific and political speculation and constitutes one of the earliest technological utopia/dystopias in Western literature. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices, and a critical introduction as well as all the illustrations from the original French edition.




Journey Through the Impossible


Book Description

This is the first complete edition and the first English translation of a surprising work by a popular French novelist whose work continues to delight readers to this day.




All the Light We Cannot See


Book Description

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).