The Lost World

Professor Challenger, a brilliant and violent zoologist, claims he has seen living prehistoric animals on an isolated plateau in the Amazon. To prove it he leads an expedition with a sceptical rival, a big-game hunter and the young journalist Edward Malone, who has joined only to impress the woman he loves. On the plateau they find dinosaurs, pterodactyls and a war between ape-men and an Indigenous people.

Published in 1912, The Lost World created the modern adventure of the hidden land of dinosaurs, and everything from King Kong to Jurassic Park owes it something. Challenger's bad temper and Malone's light humour make it great fun, especially for readers of Jules Verne such as Five Weeks in a Balloon.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born in Edinburgh, trained as a doctor and wrote stories while waiting for patients at his practice in Southsea. Sherlock Holmes, modelled partly on his old teacher Joseph Bell, who could diagnose a patient's life at a glance, first appeared in 1887 and soon made Doyle one of the best-paid writers in the world.

He grew tired of his detective, killed him off in 1893 and was forced by his readers to bring him back. Doyle also wrote historical novels, the adventure The Lost World and campaigns for wrongly convicted men. Start with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.