The Mysterious Island

In 1865, during the American Civil War, five Northern prisoners escape from besieged Richmond in a balloon: the engineer Cyrus Harding, the journalist Gideon Spilett, the sailor Pencroft, the boy Herbert and Neb, a freed slave, with their dog Top. A storm carries them across the Pacific and drops them on an unknown island, and with Harding's knowledge they build a new life from nothing, making fire, bricks, iron, glass, explosives and even a telegraph. Yet every time they face disaster, someone unseen seems to help them, and the secret of the island waits deep under its cliffs.

Jules Verne published the novel in 1874 and 1875, and its ending links it to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This English version, published under the name of W. H. G. Kingston and largely made by his wife Agnes, renames the engineer, who is Cyrus Smith in French, and takes some liberties with Verne's text. It is the great scientific heir of Robinson Crusoe.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) grew up in the port city of Nantes, watching ships leave for distant lands. Sent to Paris to study law, he wrote for the theatre instead, until the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and signed him for a series of 'extraordinary voyages' that lasted the rest of his life.

In more than sixty novels he took readers under the sea, to the Moon and around the world, mixing adventure with real science and geography. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days made him one of the most translated authors in history and inspired generations of scientists and explorers.