The Balloonist

In 1976 Farrar Strauss in the USA and Gollancz in the UK, published the 5th novel by an American writer who had been gathering momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. It was both an intense love story and a Jules Verne-type science fiction adventure, centred on an attempt by a Swedish scientist, an American journalist and a French speaking adventurer to become the first people to set foot on the North Pole. To arrive there and return, borne on the wind by a huge red and white hydrogen balloon. The book was a critical sensation, and was runner up for the National Book Awards in 1977. What was not known at the time of first publication, nor indeed when Galileo reissued this extraordinary book in 2011, was that the author had actually based this fiction on a real event: the 1897 attempt by S. A Andree to fly to the North Pole. This is a new edition, the first in a uniform presentation of selected Harris works.

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