This Wordsworth Classics volume brings together two of Jules Verne’s nineteenth-century adventure novels, combining classic adventure fiction, travel writing and early science fiction. Around the World in Eighty Days follows the reserved English gentleman Phileas Fogg and his resourceful French servant Passepartout after Fogg accepts a wager at London’s Reform Club to circle the globe within eighty days, a journey shaped by timetables, steamships, railways, police suspicion and the pressure of exact timekeeping. Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne’s first novel, follows Dr Fergusson on an ambitious balloon expedition across Africa, where scientific curiosity, geographical imagination and the risks of exploration drive the story. Read together, the two novels show Verne’s fascination with technology, distance and human determination, while raising questions about control, courage and what happens when a carefully planned route meets an unpredictable world.
Author: Jules Verne
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Publication year: 1994
Number of pages: 384
Translator: Paul Desages; Arthur Chambers
Original language: French
Original title: Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours; Cinq semaines en ballon