Lost worlds books

Lost worlds books to start from. Open one to see books like it, or tell BookSense what you loved for four picks made for you.

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New to the genre? These 5 are the books to read first.

The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle
The book that gave the genre its name. A scientific expedition to a South American plateau finds living dinosaurs, and the story is told with a sharp, comic tone.
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King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
A short, fast expedition novel in southern Africa. It set many of the genre's conventions: a map, a treasure, a guide who knows the land, and a hard journey through dangerous country.
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She
H. Rider Haggard
A lost-civilization story in which an explorer finds a immortal queen ruling a hidden kingdom. It is a key example of the lost-city branch and a major influence on later fiction about ancient rulers in remote places.
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Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jules Verne
A German professor, his nephew and a guide descend through Iceland into a hollow Earth full of prehistoric life. It is an early and influential version of the hidden-world journey.
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Lost Horizon
James Hilton
A plane crash leads to Shangri-La, a hidden Himalayan valley of calm and long life. It shows the utopian branch of the genre and gave the English language the word 'Shangri-La'.
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Chosen and described with AI from our notes on the genre.

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