In the Library
The Mysterious Island
Jules Verne, 1874
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Agnes Kinloch Kingston (1875)
- Chapters
- Chapters 62
- Length
- Length 193k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It is, that we do not consider ourselves castaways, but colonists, who have come here to settle.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Daniel Defoe
Defoe invented this shape, one man and an island and an inventory, except that Crusoe has to pray where these five simply calculate.
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Stevenson's island has its own hidden helper, the marooned Ben Gunn, living wild for years and quietly steering the castaways' fortunes.
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About the book
“Worse than that, captain! we are falling!” The novel opens in the dark above the Pacific, five prisoners of the Confederacy and a dog throwing the last of the ballast out of a balloon stolen from besieged Richmond. They come down on a bare volcanic rock carrying between them a watch, a notebook and one grain of corn. What Jules Verne does next is unlike any other adventure story: he shows the work. Fire made from two watch glasses filled with water, then bricks, then pottery, then iron, then nitroglycerine to open a channel, then a telegraph line across the island, until the bare rock holds a granite house and a mill and a flock of sheep. It is the purest fantasy of competence anybody has written, and it holds because every step is earned in front of you. Underneath runs the thing that keeps the pages turning: somebody on this uninhabited island is helping them, and has been listening since the first day.