William Pene du Bois · 1947 · global

Newbery Medal winner. A retired San Francisco arithmetic teacher goes up in a balloon in August 1883 meaning to spend a year alone in the air, is brought down by a seagull three weeks later, and washes up on Krakatoa - where twenty families are living quietly on the richest diamond mine on earth. Then the volcano goes.

1. 1
   San Francisco

   15 August 1883, and Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired arithmetic teacher, takes off alone in a balloon with a house slung beneath it, intending to spend a year in the air not speaking to anybody.

2. 2
   The Pacific

   Three weeks out, a seagull puts a hole in the balloon and he comes down in the ocean - which is the end of the plan and the beginning of the book, and which is told entirely in flashback to a Philadelphia lecture hall.

3. 3
   Krakatoa

   He washes ashore on a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait and finds twenty families living on the world's richest diamond mine - with a restaurant system, a moving-bed house and a Balloon Merry-Go-Round for emergencies.

4. 4
   The Atlantic

   27 August 1883, and Krakatoa erupts. The families escape on the platform under twenty-one balloons, drift west over the Indian Ocean and Africa, and come down in the sea - and Sherman is picked up alone.

5. 5
   New York

   Rescued by a British freighter and delivered to America, where he will not tell anybody anything until he can address the Western American Explorers' Club - which is the frame the whole novel is told inside.