Ocean State Libraries

"From the discovery of a strange parchment in an old book to the fantastic descent through a dormant volcano into a subterranean world of danger and beauty, A Journey to the Center of the Earth is as wonderfully entertaining today as when it was first published. One of Jules Verne's finest novels, its unique combination of "hard" science and vivid imagination helped establish this brilliant Frenchman as the father of modern science fiction. A high-tension...

Nationally bestselling author James Rollins has transported readers to the dark heart of the Amazon, the bowels of the earth, far below the ocean, and the top of the world. Now he embarks upon his most gripping and terrifying adventure yet: to a nightmare buried beneath a treacherous desert wasteland. An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum-a devastating blast that sets off alarms in clandestine organizations...

"Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England in August 1914. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But...

"It begins in Africa... A United Nations relief team in a small village in the Congo makes an alarming discovery. An unknown force is leveling the evolutionary playing field. Men, women, and children have been reduced to a dull, catatonic state. The environment surrounding them--plants and animals--has grown more cunning and predatory, evolving at an exponential pace. The insidious phenomenon is spreading from a cursed site in the jungle -- known...

"In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn't return{u2014}once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there's...

In this gripping thriller, a scientific expedition in Antarctica stops for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist Gracie Logan begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived--the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience. Meanwhile, a monk in Egypt experiences visions that seemed connected, and back in...

The story of two pioneering female botanists, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, and their historic 1938 boat trip down the Colorado River which led them to be the first to survey and catalog the plant life of the Grand Canyon.

In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16,000foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, and braving jaguars, pumas, insects, and vampire bats...

In 1845, young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an Arctic expedition to find the remains of the by-now-extinct great auk, a large, flightless bird of mythical status, and is trapped on a hunting ship where the crew and passengers are not what they seem.

The blood orchid is a rare flower that holds the secret to eternal life and a fortune to the pharmaceutical company that finds it. Led by a two-fisted soldier of fortune, a scientific expedition is sent deep into the jungles of Borneo to locate and bring back samples of the legendary plant. Battling their way upriver, the explorers brave poisonous insects, ferocious crocodiles and savage headhunters, unaware that they are being stalked by an even...