In Search of the Castaways

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. The message was found inside a shark. Three versions of it, in three languages, each damaged differently by seawater — French, English, German — and from the three together, only one thing could be recovered with certainty: the latitude. 37° South. The longitude was gone.

Lord Glenarvan assembles a party and sets out to find Captain Grant and the crew of the Britannia, somewhere along the entire 37th parallel. It crosses South America, Australia, and New Zealand. They will travel all of it.

The man who makes this possible — in theory — is Jacques Paganel, Secretary-General of the Paris Geographical Society, who has memorized the geography of every continent on earth and who joined the expedition by boarding the wrong ship. He knows everything about the southern hemisphere. He learned his Spanish from a Portuguese textbook. He is, in ways that become apparent with great regularity, simultaneously the party's most indispensable resource and its most reliable source of comic disaster.

Jules Verne serialized In Search of the Castaways in 1867-68, as part of the Voyages extraordinaires — the series designed to render the world's geographic and scientific knowledge in the form of adventure fiction, so that readers absorbed what they needed to know without noticing that they were being educated. The novel is one of the series' fullest achievements: three continents, three major movements, a geographic puzzle whose structure determines the shape of the journey, and a cast large enough to carry the full tonal range from high adventure to the sustained comedy of a learned man who has never quite learned to function in the world he has memorized.

Propulsive, funny, geographically exact, and organized around the most elegant plot device in Verne's catalogue: the search that must cross three continents because the message only gave them half the answer.