In the frozen North, gold fever burns hotter than any fire—and destroys everything it touches
When French-Canadian cousins Ben Raddle and Summy Skim inherit a mining claim in the Klondike, they journey north during the height of the 1890s gold rush, expecting adventure and perhaps modest fortune. What they find instead is a hell of frozen rivers, makeshift cities, desperate men, and the legend of the Gold Volcano—a mountain said to contain such wealth that it will one day erupt, showering gold across the landscape.
Written by Jules Verne in 1899 and published posthumously in 1906 after substantial revision by his son Michel Verne, The Gold Volcano stands among Verne's darkest works—a relentless examination of greed's corrupting power and nature's terrible indifference to human ambition. Set during the actual Klondike Gold Rush, the novel portrays with documentary precision the brutal reality behind the dream: prospectors dying of exposure and disease, fortunes won and lost in moments, and civilization's thin veneer dissolving in the face of wealth's allure.
This new translation draws on both Jules Verne's stark original manuscript and Michel Verne's revised version, offering readers access to a work that challenges everything we expect from the author of Around the World in Eighty Days. Here is Verne at his most pessimistic and psychologically acute—showing us what we become when gold fever takes hold, and what remains when the fever breaks.
A masterpiece of late Verne—uncompromising, prophetic, and unforgettable.
