Around The World In Eighty Days

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Penguin
Publisher Place: Australia
Publisher Year: 2010
Edition: Reprint

Description: 293 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: One ill-fated evening at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg rashly bets his companions 20,000 pounds that he can travel around the entire globe in just eighty days and he is determined not to lose. Travelling by train, steamship, sailing boat, sledge and even elephant, the reserved Englishman and his manservant must overcome storms, kidnappings, natural disasters, Sioux attacks and the dogged Inspector Fix of Scotland Yard who believes that Fogg has robbed the Bank of England to win the extraordinary wager. Around the World in Eighty Days gripped audiences on its publication and remains hugely popular, combining exploration, adventure and a thrilling race against time. Author Biography Jules Verne (1828 - 1905) lived and died in France but developed an early passion for travel. When he was eleven years old he tried, unsuccessfully, to run away to sea. He returned home and promised his mother that in future he would imagine travelling - this proved to be a prophetic remark. In the early 1860s, a magazine manager liked one of his adventure stories and gave him a contract to write similar stories for the next twenty years! The collected stories became known as Vernes Voyages Extraordinaires. His stories were of fantastic adventures with a degree of realism in the descriptions of events and scientific content - he was a pioneer of science fiction. He did lots of research for his books but occasionally made up a scientific fact if it suited the story. History has shown that he had an incredible sense of what was possible - his imagined inventions have often turned out to be close to later real inventions. His most famous story, Around the World in Eighty Days, is more realistic than much of his work as its set in a real rather than a possible world. The story was based on the travels of an eccentric man from Boston, called George Frances Tain, who set out to do exactly what the title suggested. The books famous hero, Phileas Fogg, was named after a travel writer of the time, William Parry Fogg. The hilarious adventures of Phileas Fogg and his servant Paspartout, owe everything to Vernes imagination. The book is still popular and sales were boosted at the end of the twentieth century when Michael Palin undertook the journey using only the transport that would have been available to Fogg - he was accompanied by a team of TV cameramen! Jules Verne suffered much pain in later life from a leg wound caused when a nephew went mad and shot him. He died of old age, the author of such classics as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

ISBN: 9780141194769