Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager (roughly £1.6 million today) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works. The story starts in London on Tuesday, October 1, 1872. Fogg is a rich English...

First published in 1886, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is author Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of man's inner struggle between good and evil. The novella revolves around the investigation by London lawyer Gabriel John Utterson, concerning the association between his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll and the evil, morally corrupt Edward Hyde, to whom Jekyll has recently willed his estate. Through the use of a magic potion, Dr. Jekyll, who nurtured a belief...

This is Mark Twain's first novel about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it has become one of the world's best-loved books. It is a fond reminiscence of life in Hannibal, Missouri, an evocation of Mark Twain's own boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi during the 1840s. "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," he tells us. This is a book one never forgets: Tom whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, Tom and Huck's dreadful oath, their...

Lovely Esmeralda, haunted by an obsessive would-be lover and unjustly accused of murder, unexpectedly finds a tormented protector in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimodo the hunchback keeps to his duties as bell-ringer of Notre Dame cathedral and stays close to his guardian, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. His devotion proves misguided when a plan of Frollo's goes wrong and Quasimodo finds himself abused by a crowd and shown mercy only by the gypsy...

Captains Courageous is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, that follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic. The book's title comes from the ballad "Mary Ambree", which starts, "When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt". Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers,...

In the mid-nineteenth century, a French professor and his two companions, trapped aboard a fantastic submarine as prisoners of the deranged Captain Nemo, come face to face with exotic ocean creatures and strange sights hidden from the world above.

While traveling on a ship, a Swiss pastor, his wife and four sons encounter a violent storm that abruptly transports them to a tropical island. They attempt to navigate the desolate shore but face looming danger and an unforeseen presence. A family venture turns into a survival effort when a ship is damaged during a tropical storm. A father, mother and four sons stumble across a small island that appears to be uninhabited. They set up camp, complete...

When the destinies of King Louis XIV and a mysterious prisoner in an iron mask converge, the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan find themselves caught between conflicting loyalties.

One night a shooting star is seen over the skies of Surrey. The next day, it's discovered to have been a mysterious metallic cylinder from Mars. What comes next is a terrifying alien attack, as tentacled Martian invaders emerge from the cylinder and prey on humankind using shocking new weapons against which the people of Victorian England can offer no resistance. The aliens begin to devastate the area in their tripod machines, and as our narrator...

Phileas Fogg must be insane. No one has ever been able to circle the globe in only 80 days! Yet he's bet his friends that he'll do just that. Half of his fortune is one the line...and the outcome looks far from certain.