One of the great page-turners in English literature -- John Sutherland - Guardian

I can distinctly remember handling the book as if it might somehow give me, a boy in Africa, magical access to the African adventures it contained. It still does now. I need only pick up this book and, like the door to Solomon's treasure chamber, a mass of stone rises from the floor and vanishes into the rock above -- Giles Foden - Guardian

Henry Rider Haggard was born in Norfolk in 1856. His post of junior secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, Sir Henry Bulwer meant that he travelled and he spent six years in South Africa . Haggard was bet by his brother that he could not write as good a novel as Stevenson's Treasure Island. The result of this bet was Haggard's 1885 book, King Solomon's Mines. It became a runaway bestseller so Haggard was able to leave London and concentrate on his writing. He published She in 1887. Andrew Lang thought She was ‘one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet'. Haggard died in 1925.