The Mysterious Island - Complete and Unabridged

by Jules Verne

Overview

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea: Part 2!

'The Mysterious Island' is Jules Verne's unofficial 1874 sequel to both 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and 'In Search of the Castaways.'

The story tells the adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. The story begins in the American Civil War, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America. As famine and death ravage the city, five northern prisoners of war decide to escape by the unusual means of hijacking a balloon.

The escapees are Cyrus Smith, a railroad engineer in the Union army (named Cyrus Harding in some English translations); his black manservant Neb (short for Nebuchadnezzar), a former slave who had been freed by Smith; the sailor Bonadventure Pencroff (who is addressed only by his surname, but his "Christian name", Bonadventure, is given to their boat; in other translations, he is also known as Pencroft); his protégé Harbert Brown (called Herbert in some translations), a young boy whom Pencroff raises as his own after the death of his father (Pencroff's former captain); and the journalist Gedéon Spilett (Gideon Spilett in English versions). The company is completed by Cyrus' dog "Top".

After flying in stormy weather for several days, the group crash-lands on a cliff-bound, volcanic, unknown island, described as being located somewhere east of New Zealand. The island has a secret: it is Captain Nemo's hideout and home port of The Nautilus.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149183319
Publisher:	Enhanced E-Books
Publication date:	05/26/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	386
File size:	569 KB

About the Author

Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
Born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, Verne was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, not least because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.
Verne is the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, between the English-language writers Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare, and probably was the most-translated during the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of the authors sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction", as are H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

Date of Birth:

February 8, 1828

Date of Death:

March 24, 1905

Place of Birth:

Nantes, France

Place of Death:

Amiens, France

Education:

Nantes lycée and law studies in Paris