The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Volume 2 (of 2)

Long before Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, Robert Paltock imagined a world beneath our own where humans walk among beings who harness the air itself. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is one of the English novel's strangest and most neglected treasures: a 1751 fantasy that predates Mary Shelley, that plays in the same sandbox as Swift but with a gentler, more endearing absurdity. Our Cornish hero, shipwrecked into a subterranean realm, has now made a life among the Glums and Gawrys, winged people who fly through cavernous skies. He's married Youwarkee, a Gawry, and Volume II finds him anticipating the arrival of his father-in-law, Pendlehamby, with the nervous energy of any son-in-law dreading the family visit. Peter attempts to educate his new relatives about English customs, firearms, and the mysteries of proper tea etiquette, with results that are both hilarious and surprisingly touching. This is a novel about the small, universal anxieties of belonging somewhere new, played out against a backdrop of flying people and underground kingdoms. It wears its age beautifully, full of 18th-century gentility and whimsy, and it asks a question that still resonates: how do we bring ourselves to the people we love, even when we come from entirely different worlds?