Published in 1912, The Lost World follows the irascible Professor George Edward Challenger and a small expedition into the Amazon basin, where a remote plateau has remained cut off from evolutionary time — dinosaurs still roam, pterodactyls soar, and a colony of ape-men contests the terrain with a tribe of primitive humans. Arthur Conan Doyle brought the same storytelling energy to Challenger that he had given to Sherlock Holmes, and the resulting adventure is one of the great scientific romance novels in English.
The novel essentially created the template for every “lost land” story that followed, from King Kong to Jurassic Park. Download the free EPUB to read the original at its roaring, exuberant best.