Humanity has spent three years listening to Mars.Now Mars has asked a question.The first exchanges were numbers, patterns, corrections, painstaking proof that two civilizations could recognize meaning without understanding one another. Gavin Marks helped build that fragile language one signal at a time. He knows better than anyone how much can be lost between a message and the meaning people want it to have.But governments are tired...

My plan was perfect…My friend needed a date. And my brother’s best friend was single. Problem solved.Until I saw Jaeger for the first time in years, and sparks flew in the wrong direction.Jaeger has grown up and bulked up. But that shouldn’t matter, because I have the perfect life. Really.Only my plans are beginning to unravel and now visions of Jaeger's hard abs, broad shoulders, and intense green eyes fill my head.I should hold back in cas...

A chronological voyage from the unexplored Earth to distant planets and imagined futures, uniting the visionary inventions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells with Jack London's elemental adventures. Included works: Five Weeks in a Balloon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Journey into the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon (Jules Verne) — The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon,...

Marcea of the Dust finds our heroine, Marcea, walking a fine moral line between the emotional trauma of her childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father and her response to other young women, whom she stumbles across accidentally in the sex trade of Mexico. Marcea's actions challenge the lives of those around her, especially those of Collo and Drayson, her loving, fearless stepparents. Seeking refuge with nine young female victims of the sex trade, she turns to her stepparent...

Off-limits never looked so tempting.Levi Cade’s firefighting career burned up after an accident on the job. Then is father died and left him in charge of the family’s multimillion-dollar resort. Now he’s forced to work with financially uptight advisors telling him what to do, and he needs someone he can trust at his side.The perfect candidate walks through the door in a pencil skirt, fitted white blouse, and a mass of wavy blond hair she tries to contain.

In the wake of war, the Baltimore Gun Club becomes a roaring satire of martial vanity, its members measuring glory by the size of their cannons and the scale of destruction they can devise. When peace leaves these "Exterminating Angels" idle, their frustration turns to restless invention—until President Impey Barbicane, coldly brilliant and utterly practical, unveils a scheme so audacious it transforms boredom into global excitement: fire a cannonball to the moon. Verne turns the impossibl...

Desiring a more romantic crossing of the Atlantic, Englishman J. R. Kazallon decides to forgo a steamship and instead sets sail on the Chancellor, a large three-mast sailing ship. What follows is a classic nautical adventure, told in the form of a series of diary entries and filled with tragedy, suffering, and even horror. Despite the grim subject matter, Jules Verne still finds space to include ample descriptions of geology, biology, and meteorology.As catastrophe piles upon catas...

The Mysterious Island tells the tale of five Americans who, in an attempt to escape the Civil War, pilot a hot-air balloon and find themselves crashed on a desert island somewhere in the Pacific. Verne had been greatly influenced by works like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and that influence shines brightly in this novel of engineering ingenuity and adventure. Verne imparts the escapees with such over-the-top cleverness and so many luckily placed...

Set in the early 1890s, The Special Correspondent tells the story of Claudius Bombarnac, special correspondent from the Parisian newspaper Twentieth Century, assigned to travel the newly completed Grand Transasiatic Railway running from Uzun Ada (on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea) to Peking (Beijing), China. Over his thirteen-day journey he meets an eclectic cast of characters, including an impatient American businessman, a detached English lady, a Russian major, a French actor and a...

The Child of the Cavern is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, part of his Voyages Extraordinaires series, reproduced here from its Standard Ebooks edition.The Child of the Cavern follows engineer James Starr as he receives a letter from an old friend and co-worker, Simon Ford, requesting that he revisit a depleted coal mine in Scotland that he used to manage. Upon arriving, Starr finds the entire Ford family living in the mine, and Ford explains that a new coal ve...

An ex-slave trader named Torres comes across a secret encrypted note and schemes to figure out what it means. Meanwhile, Joam Garral, who runs a farm in Peru near the source of the Amazon river and is an outlaw from Brazil, accedes to his daughter's wishes to get married to her love at the mouth of the Amazon. They decide to travel down the Amazon with the entire family and servants in a giant raft, encountering many adventures on the way.21st in the Voyages Extraordinaires series,...

Hulda, the daughter of an innkeeper in the Norwegian countryside, is engaged to Ole, a fisherman. When Ole fails to return, Hulda fears him dead, until she receives a message that he has scribbled on the back of a lottery ticket. Newspapers broadcast the story, fueling excitement and speculation ahead of the lottery drawing.The novel, based in part on Verne's travel through Scandinavia in 1861, belongs to the collection Voyages Extraordinaires, which contains some of his best-known...