The Thompson & Co. Agency: A New Translation

By Jules Verne

The tour of a lifetime-if you survive it

When Robert Morgand, a impoverished French aristocrat, accepts a position as interpreter with Thompson & Co. travel agency, he expects a routine cruise to the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands. What he gets is a floating disaster: a decrepit ship, an incompetent operator, and sixty passengers whose dreams of exotic travel are about to become a nightmare of mechanical failures, medical quarantines, and desert survival.

Published posthumously in 1907 as part of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires and extensively shaped by his son Michel Verne, The Thompson & Co. Agency combines sharp social satire with gripping adventure. What begins as a comedy of errors-cheap fares hiding cheaper service, promised luxury revealing corner-cutting fraud-escalates into genuine peril as the voyage deteriorates from inconvenience into catastrophe.

With remarkable prescience, the novel anticipates modern anxieties about discount travel, false advertising, and the vulnerability of customers far from home. Yet it also celebrates human resourcefulness, the unexpected courage that emerges under pressure, and the dark comedy that unfolds when incompatible people are trapped together in deteriorating circumstances.

A hidden gem in the Verne legacy-wickedly funny, surprisingly relevant, and ultimately thrilling.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DW8XRM33
• ISBN13: 9798309538508
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"