F. Anstey 4 hr 36 min read

Struggling young architect Horace Ventimore buys a sealed old brass bottle at auction, and unwittingly frees Fakrash, an overpoweringly grateful jinnee whose 'gifts' upend his life.

F. Anstey's 1900 novel is a beloved comic fantasy of a genie loose in Victorian London. Witty, charming, delightfully farcical. Read it for a classic wish-gone-wrong comedy, where an ancient jinnee's misguided generosity plagues a modern young man with disastrous, hilarious magnificence.

In its time

Published in 1900, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

4 hr 36 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).