Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

De: Jules Verne

Narrado por: Bill Homewood

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

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 journey

If you are like me and pondering whether or not you like the voice for the demo to listen through. Choose this book. I listened to multiple other trials before I settled on this voice to read me this story. Honestly at first I was just going to ride it out but now I don’t know if I can ever listen to it by anyone else. The voices are now part of my journey and I’m very happy with both the book and the reader. Ned felt like my favorite voice and a perfect fit!

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.

A dream audiobook

The narrator is magic and the story is so full of events, marvellous adventures and long enough for you to feel part of it. Wish to find an illustrated book of it now. Thank you for this journey!

A good one

A good reading of this complex masterpiece. It starts with a complete translation, which only a handful of the audio versions do: the ones narrated by James Frain, Norman Dietz, and Tony Law are among this handful. Americans are often unaware of just how terrible most translations of Verne are. Almost all of the versions of this novel on Audible use a Victorian translation that is filled with mistranslations and is also missing about 25% of Verne’s text!

This is one of the happy exceptions.

Bill Homewood has a formal style of narration, complete with trilled Rs. It takes some getting used to, but it lends itself well to the lyrical descriptions of nature that appear here, and when the narrative picks up speed and passion, so does his voice. He is good at differentiating Verne’s characters, and he also, almost paradoxically given his formality, captures well some of the more humorous moments of Aronnax’s narrative.
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. Walter published a much-revised translation as part of an anthology entitled “Amazing Journeys” (SUNY Press, 2010). He has since passed on. If you want his last take on the novel, that anthology is the place to go. In the meantime this is one of the best audio versions of the novel available, and it deserves points for at least giving the translator credit — there are more than a few audio versions of this translation that don’t bother to mention him.