A Journey to the Centre of the Earth

An eccentric German professor decodes a three-hundred-year-old message hidden in a runic manuscript. It claims the center of the Earth can be reached through the crater of an Icelandic volcano. He drags his terrified nephew along. They descend. What they find beneath the surface of the planet is one of the most extraordinary visions in nineteenth-century literature: underground seas, prehistoric forests, creatures that should have been extinct for sixty million years, and a darkness so absolute it rewrites everything they thought they knew about the world. Jules Verne published this in 1864, only his second novel, and it established the template for everything that followed: real science made into real adventure, delivered at a pace that never lets the reader look away. The relationship between the obsessive professor and his reluctant nephew remains one of the great double acts in fiction. A Raven's Gate Classics edition.