Jules Verne 2 hr 53 min read

Summoned by contradictory letters to an abandoned Scottish coal mine, engineer James Starr descends with old miner Simon Ford, and finds a vast, living world of caverns beneath the earth.

Jules Verne's 1877 novel is a rousing entry in the Voyages Extraordinaires. Vivid, atmospheric, wonderfully imaginative. Read it for classic Verne underground adventure, a whole subterranean realm with its own lake, its own weather, and its own mysteries, complete with the eerie Fire-Maidens and a secret menace stalking the Black Indies.

In its time

Published in 1877, during the 1870s, under the sea and around the moon.

Reading it

2 hr 53 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).