Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Folio Society Edition

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The world is facing an unprecedented menace: a sea creature whose monstrous bulk and speed threatens even the sturdiest of ships. Invited to join the hunt for this elusive predator, French naturalist Pierre Aronnax discovers the far more astonishing truth. Under the seas lurks a giant submarine, governed by the mysterious Captain Nemo, one of fiction’s most famous anti-heroes. Held captive on the Nautilus with his manservant Conseil and a bellicose harpooner named Ned Land, Aronnax soon learns that his days as a land-dweller may be over, while his aquatic adventures have only just begun …

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas is a superbly original work of literature, both imaginative and prescient. Jules Verne was concerned with the outermost peripheries of scientific possibility, but his fiction was anchored in developments that would soon come to pass, such as electric lighting and mass tourism. As Margaret Drabble aptly writes, he is ‘the saint of travel agents and the master of the travelogue’.

Verne grew up near the coast, in Nantes, and his ardour for the sea is reflected in his vivid descriptions: ‘scarlet rosetangles’ in underwater forests; ‘brilliant waves’ of light emitted by ‘pelagic infusoria and military noctilucents’. William Butcher revised his excellent translation for this edition. It presents Verne’s thrilling story in all its linguistic brilliance, while Jillian Tamaki’s illustrations depict with skill ‘that extraordinary, supernatural, implausible expedition’.