Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

By: Jules Verne

Narrated by: Bill Homewood

Length: 18 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

The most exciting underwater adventure ever!

In 1866 a mysterious giant whale savagely attacks ships in international seas. A famous French marine biologist, Pierre Aronnax, joins the hunt to track down and incapacitate the creature. With him are his loyal servant, Conseil, and redoubtable Canadian harpooner Ned Land. They soon find that their enemy is no sea beast but a brilliantly designed submarine. They are captured and imprisoned by its master, the sinister Captain Nemo. The story is relentlessly thrilling while containing beautifully written observations of underwater life.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has been hugely influential on popular culture, having inspired several stage and film adaptations, including a Walt Disney film with Kirk Douglas. Captain Nemo also appears as a main character in the graphic novel and film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Bill Homewood's distinctive voice is perfect for the French classics: He has previously read The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Three Musketeers for Naxos AudioBooks and is "...a narrator so perfectly matched to his material that you can't help but smile" (The Times).

Download the accompanying reference guide.

Public Domain (P)2016 Naxos AudioBooks

No giant squid?! Good book though

Guuuuvvvv hyuu yuu hhcgh hhjv hhh h h j h h h h h h

A monotonous yet moving marvel

Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues is quite the novel. It can bore you to tears with classification of marine life (unless you enjoy that kind of thing) and then thrill you with terrifying or impressive drama. Bill Homewood does a remarkable job keeping the listener engaged, and indeed breathless as you imagine the crew about to perish from asphyxiation. Overall an enjoyable experience.

A good one

A good reading of this complex masterpiece. It starts with a complete translation, which only a handful of Verne audiobooks do: the ones narrated by James Frain and Norman Dietz are among this handful. (Penguin Classics has also just released a good, complete reading of the novel.) Most Americans are unaware of just how hacked up most translations of Verne are. Almost all of the versions available on Audible use a terrible Victorian translation that is notoriously inaccurate and is also missing about 25% of Verne’s text! Naxos gets points for using a good translation as a basis for this audiobook. More about that in a minute, though.

Bill Homewood has a formal style of narration, complete with trilled Rs. It takes some getting used to, but it lends itself well to some of the lyrical descriptions of nature that appear here, and when the narrative picks up speed and passion, so does his voice. Naxos has recently released the other “Big Four” Verne titles, also narrated by Homewood (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, From the Earth to the Moon/Around the Moon).

FURTHER NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION. The translation Naxos used for this — an excellent one — is by FP Walter. At one time it was in the public domain, although I believe it has since been withdrawn, and Walter has published a much-revised translation as part of an anthology entitled “Amazing Journeys” (SUNY Press, 2010). All the translations are new, and it includes many of the original illustrations. If you’re a Verne fan, or you’re looking for a gift for one, check out Walter’s anthology.

A whale of a tale!

This is the world's best story. l know that everyone says that about their favorite book, but I will never forget this tale.

Great narration but meh story

Hope you really want to learn about oceanic life. Cuz you will. Overall story is decent but far too much time is taken by classifying and explaining the nuances of marine life. Glad I did this by audio book... never would have made it through. All in all worth a listen.

Best Science fiction of all time

this is so often forgotten in the genre of science fiction, but it is, in my opinion, one of the first, and best.

Excellent!

The story greatly exceeded my expectations. Bill Homewood does a great job with the characters and their personalities and voices to match.

Great book

the story is a bit slow, not Lord of the rings slow, but the list of fish seen gets a bit tiresome at points. otherwise, this book, a true classic, is amazing.

A very remarkable tale worth a second listen.

Enjoyable from beginning to end, Allowing your imagination to run free! Finely executed, the listener can sit back and soak in the vastness of the sea all awhile being spurred to adventure!

Passion for the seas

I read this classic as a child and was drawn into the plot by the detail of the world under the seas. Now listening to Bill Homewood narrating the story of the enigma that is Captain Nemo, I realize how much man knows about the marine world and how little the average man cares to study and learn from.

The story is still as riveting as I found it as a child but ending in an anticlimax. The superb narration buffs up the quality of the experience nevertheless. Great for a casual listen particularly when traveling around coastal territories.