The Lost World

About the book

The journalist Edward Malone seeks an adventure that might prove his courage and encounters Professor Challenger, whose extraordinary claims have made him both notorious and ridiculed. An expedition sets out for South America to examine evidence of a world preserved beyond ordinary knowledge. Doyle gives the travellers contrasting habits of mind, making scientific disagreement and personal rivalry part of the comedy. Their destination soon requires more than argument, testing practical skill, cooperation, and assumptions about the boundary between observer and participant. The narrative takes the form of reported experience, inviting readers to share the excitement of discoveries whose credibility is initially uncertain. Its enduring energy comes from the collision between intellectual confidence and a setting that repeatedly refuses to behave like a manageable research problem.

• Exploration
• Scientific rivalry
• Cooperation

Why read it

For a lively expedition story whose competing personalities make discovery as comic as it is dangerous.

English text