Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Simon Prebble

Geologist Otto Lidenbrock is perusing an ancient Icelandic manuscript when he discovers a mysterious encrypted note. The message reveals the account of a sixteenth-century explorer who claims to have found a passageway to the center of the earth.

In his quest to penetrate the planet’s primordial secrets, the impetuous professor, together with his quaking nephew, Axel, and their devoted guide, Hans, sets off immediately for Iceland. Descending through the belly of a volcano into the bowels of the Earth, they discover an astonishing subterranean world of prehistoric proportions.

A classic of science fiction that helped give birth to the genre, this imaginative speculation on the earth’s nature is both a rousing adventure story and an apt portrait of the psychology of the questing scientist.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) is considered by many the father of science fiction. Born in Nantes, France, he studied law but turned to writing opera libretti until the 1863 publication of his first Voyages extraordinaires—Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Its success encouraged him to produce a number of classic and prophetic science-fiction novels, including A Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Verne’s stories foresaw many scientific and technological developments, including the submarine, television, and space travel.

Simon Prebble, British-born Simon Prebble has built a successful career that spans the Atlantic. As a stage and television actor, he has played in everything from soaps to Shakespeare, but it is as a veteran narrator of over four hundred audiobooks that he has made his mark since coming to the United States in 1990. As one of AudioFile magazine's Golden Voices, Simon has received over twenty Earphones Awards and five Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, and he has been a finalist fourteen times for an Audie Award, the audiobook industry's version of the Oscar. In 2006, Publishers Weekly named him Narrator of the Year, and he was named Booklist's 2010 Voice of Choice.