Tarzan of the Apes

A river journey upcountry to collect an ivory agent who has stopped answering, and who has become something nobody wants to look at directly. Short, dense and impossible to shake off.

Joseph Conrad

A hunter, a baronet and a naval officer follow a three hundred year old map across the desert toward a diamond mine nobody has come back from. The first lost world novel.

H. Rider Haggard

Quatermain cannot settle down, so he goes back inland after a rumour of a white civilisation nobody has reached. The direct sequel to King Solomon's Mines, and wilder than it.

H. Rider Haggard

A shard of pottery sends two men to a lost African kingdom ruled by a queen who has been waiting two thousand years for someone in particular. One of the best selling novels ever written.

H. Rider Haggard

An impossible professor claims there is a plateau in the Amazon where dinosaurs are still alive, and dares four men to go and check. Every lost world story since owes it something.

Arthur Conan Doyle