Five Weeks in a Balloon

"A classic piece of French speculative fiction" from the author of Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth ( Los Angeles Review of Books).   The first book of Jules Verne's Extraordinary Voyages series, Five Weeks in a Balloon follows the adventures of English inventor Samuel Fergusson and the passengers on his magnificent hot air balloon: his dutiful assistant, Joe, and Scottish hunter Dick Kennedy. Hoping to explore lands yet undiscovered by others, they embark on a four-thousand-mile journey over Africa, from Zanzibar to Senegal.   "The sheer pace of the action keeps the reader travelling along with the balloon. . . . A rollicking adventure novel suffused with the spirit of the age of reason. A definite must-read for anyone who is either interested in the birth of science fiction, or those who enjoy tales of the dark heart of pre-colonial Africa a [sic] la Rider Haggard." — Snake Oil Review   "Both a travelogue and a picaresque series of adventures. . . . Verne writes geek fiction—filled, in this case, with details of a technical contraption and of a body of knowledge in which the reader is also caught up, by means of the fiction." — Strange Horizons   "Verne's first great commercial success, was one of his most enduringly popular novels . . . [An] entertaining, historically important, and complex breakthrough novel." — Los Angeles Review of Books