The Mysterious Island

· Sold by Modern Library
4.3
9 reviews
Ebook
768
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, The Mysterious Island is considered by many to be Jules Verne’s masterpiece. “Wide-eyed mid-nineteenth-century humanistic optimism in a breezy, blissfully readable translation by Stump” (Kirkus Reviews), here is the enthralling tale of five men and a dog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island of bewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncover the island’s secret.

Ratings and reviews

4.3
9 reviews
A Google user
October 28, 2011
Somehow I approach a Jules Verne novel expecting to journey through great mystery and adventure on land, on sea, perhaps on the moon. And Mysterious Island does indeed have a tale to tell, although the story is quite thin and the conversational styles annoyingly outdated. Verne spends so much time describing how the castaways survive on the island that the novel reads more like a survivalist guide than a work of intriguing fiction. I found myself skimming through yet another overly detailed description of how they farmed, how they made tools, how they extracted metal, so eager was I to get back to the story, which in the end was simply not enough to keep me going.
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z4yaaa
October 7, 2014
Is this really exist?
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About the author

Jordan Stump is an associate professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and translator of more than half a dozen French novels. His translation of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Claude Simon’s Le jardin des plantes won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for 2001.

Caleb Carr is the bestselling author of The Alienist and, most recently, The Lessons of Terror. He lives in New York.

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