H. Rider Haggard clearly displays his wonderfully dramatic imagination, combined with his deep knowledge of Africa, in King Solomon's Mines, which recounts the adventures of Allan Quartermain, Sir Henry Curtis, and Captain John Good. Written in 1885, the book was hailed by his publishers as "THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN."...

The first great "Lost World" action-adventure-a precursor to Indiana Jones

H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines has entertained generations of readers since its first publication in 1885. Following a mysterious map of dubious reliability, a small group of men trek into southern Africa in search of a lost friend-and a lost treasure, the fabled mines of King Solomon. Led by the English adventurer and fortune hunter Allan Quartermain, they discover a frozen corpse, survive untold dangers in remote mountains and deserts, and encounter the merciless King Twala en route to the legendary hoard of diamonds....

A runaway bestseller on its publication in 1887, H. Rider Haggard’s She is a Victorian thrill ride of a novel, featuring a lost African kingdom ruled by a mysterious, implacable queen; ferocious wildlife and yawning abysses; and an eerie love story that spans two thousand years. She has bewitched readers from Freud and Jung to C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic—which includes period illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H. M. Kerr—Margaret Atwood asserts that the awe-inspiring Ayesha, “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” is “a permanent feature of the human imagination.”...

An elephant hunter's chronicle of his safari into the interior of South Africa to search for a fabled diamond mine and to rescue the brother of the English gentleman who accompanies him across the deserts and mountains....