Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Tells the story of distinguished but eccentric Professor Lidenbrock, who finds a scrap of parchment in an old manuscript. A cipher written in runes, it tells of an entrance to another world - a world hidden beneath our own, illuminated by an electrified gas and populated by strange, prehistoric beings.

“The reason Verne is still read by millions today
is simply that he was one of the best storytellers
who ever lived.”—Arthur C. Clarke

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was a French author and a pioneer of the science-fiction genre. His novels include Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

Frank Wynne has been a literary translator for more than a decade and has translated works by, among others, Michel Houellebecq, Ahmadou Kourouma, Petr Král and Almudena Grandes. He won the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translation of Frédéric Beigbeder's Love Lasts Three Years , the 2005 Independent Fiction Prize for Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World and the 2002 IMPAC prize for Atomised his translation of Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires .

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including Horse Heaven , The Greenlanders , A Thousand Acres , and Ten Days in the Hills , as well as a guide to the Novel, entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. She has won the Pulitzer Prize and been short-listed for the Orange Prize. She lives in California.

Peter Cogman won a Scholarship to read Modern and Medieval Languages at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he subsequently gained a Ph.D. for research on the work of the 1900s poet and novelist P.-J. Toulet. He taught French at the University of Southampton, and is the author of Narration in Nineteenth-Century French Short Fiction: Prosper Mérimée to Marcel Schwob (2002).