‘Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen’ (French: ‘Cinq semaines en ballon’) is an adventure novel by Jules Verne.
It is the first Verne novel in which he perfected the ‘ingredients’ of his later work, skillfully mixing a plot full of adventure and twists that hold the reader’s interest with passages of technical, geographic, and historic description. The book gives readers a glimpse of the exploration of Africa, which was still not completely known to Europeans of the time, with explorers traveling all over the continent in search of its secrets.
Public interest in fanciful tales of African exploration was at its height, and the book was an instant hit; it made Verne financially independent and got him a contract with Jules Hetzel’s publishing house, which put out several dozen more works of his for over forty years afterward.
About the author
Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Verne was born in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ‘Voyages extraordinaires’, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ (1864), ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ (1870), and ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ (1873).
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