Two Years' Vacation

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A storm tears a schooner loose in Auckland harbour with no adults aboard, only fifteen boys from the Chairman boarding school, aged eight to fourteen, among them the cabin boy. They are carried across the Pacific and wrecked on an uninhabited coast, with no way of knowing whether it is an island or part of a continent.

What follows is a sustained study of how a society forms. The boys explore, map and name their territory; they find a cave and make it a home; they agree to elect a leader for a limited term. Briant, the generous French boy, and Doniphan, the proud English one, divide the colony between them, and the split is not resolved by an adventure but by the slow discovery that neither can manage without the other. Service, who has read his Robinson Crusoe, is sure he knows how it is done. The youngest have to be taught, and the teaching is part of the work.

Verne published it in 1888, and in his preface he describes it as the last piece of his cycle of Robinson stories: a boarding school of Robinsons. The answer he gives is unsentimental: the danger, when it arrives, comes from adults, and the boys survive it because of what they have already built among themselves. Readers have often set it beside Golding's Lord of the Flies, which puts boys in the same position and reaches a far darker conclusion. This new translation is complete and unabridged.

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Lydbog: 25. oktober 2026