The Lost World

A pompous, red-bearded professor stands before a London lecture hall and makes an impossible claim: somewhere deep in the South American jungle, on a plateau cut off from the rest of the world, dinosaurs are still alive. He has the photographs. He has the bones. He has the temper to flatten anyone who calls him a liar.

So an expedition is mounted. A sceptical rival scientist. A big-game hunter who has shot everything worth shooting. A young reporter trying to impress the girl he loves. And the impossible Professor Challenger himself, dragging them all toward a wall of red cliffs no man has ever climbed.

What waits on top of that plateau is worse and more wonderful than any of them imagined.

First published in 1912, The Lost World is Arthur Conan Doyle at his most gleeful – a roaring, pulpy, big-hearted adventure that helped invent an entire genre. Without this book there is no King Kong, no Jurassic Park, no lost-civilisation movie of any kind. Doyle gave us Sherlock Holmes; here he gave us something wilder.