The Lost World

A young journalist, Edward Malone, is told by the woman he loves that she can give her heart only to a man of great deeds. So he goes looking for danger — and finds it in Professor George Edward Challenger, a black-bearded, bull-necked scientist who claims to have discovered, deep in the Amazon basin, a sheer-walled plateau where the prehistoric past has never ended.

Ridiculed by his peers, Challenger mounts an expedition to prove it: himself, the skeptical Professor Summerlee, the big-game hunter Lord John Roxton, and Malone to bear witness. They climb to the plateau, their bridge is destroyed behind them, and they find themselves marooned in a world out of time — iguanodons grazing in the open, pterodactyls wheeling over a fetid swamp, and a war raging between a tribe of plateau dwellers and a colony of savage ape-men.

Narrated as Malone's breathless dispatches home, The Lost World is told with the dry precision of a naturalist's notebook and the speed of a boy's adventure. Challenger — loud, vain, and very nearly always right — is one of Doyle's finest creations, the roaring opposite of the still, deductive Sherlock Holmes.

First serialised in 1912, the novel founded an entire subgenre: the isolated plateau where dinosaurs survive became one of the most borrowed images in popular fiction, echoing through King Kong and down to Jurassic Park. It is read here for what it has always been — funny, fast, and shameless in its love of wonder.