"...let me recommend an audiobook: William Butcher’s Jules Verne: The Biography ... It's a 'voyage extraordinaire' through the bittersweet life and encyclopedic imagination of one of the most popular writers of all time. Happy listening!" — William Dirda, The Washington Post

From the established expert on the subject comes this new biography of one of the world's most successful writers. Breath-taking in scope, and full of the kind of revelations sure to cause press and controversy, Butcher combines existing and new research on Verne’s life with the evidence from Verne's works to explore what sort of man Jules Verne was, how he achieved what he did, what went on inside his head, what really made him tick.

Butcher examines the forgotten nitty-gritty of Verne’s life: his appearance, his schoolmates, the size of his bedroom, who he talked to and slept with, who he fell out with and was sued by, the fibs he told, how he got to work, how much he made, what he did on his days off, where he went, what he studied, what he read, whether he was a good husband and father — in sum, all the behavior that points to personality, as only a family member can know it.