02614cam a22003253u 450000100060000000300070000600500170001300600020003000700050003200800410003704000110007804100170008905000070010610000470011324500210016026400510018130000470023233600260027933700260030533800360033150000310036750801860039852014830058453400580206765300250212565300240215085600520217485600430222699900190226977484UtSlPG20260610134808.0mcr n260607r20251908utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d  aUtSlPG 7aen2iso639-1 4aPR1 aShiel, M. P.q(Matthew Phipps),d1865-194714aThe isle of lies 1aSalt Lake City, UT :bProject Gutenberg,c2025  a1 online resource :bmultiple file formats  atextbtxt2rdacontent  acomputerbc2rdamedia  aonline resourcebcr2rdacarrier  aRelease date is 2025-12-17  aTim Lindell, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)  a"The isle of lies" by M. P. Shiel is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows Professor Reid’s account of Dr. Lepsius, a brilliant but unscrupulous scientist who steals an ancient stele, then breeds and raises a child in isolation on a Hebridean island to create a mind capable of deciphering it. The story centers on the manufactured prodigy Hannibal, the desperate father who built his world on deceptions, and the crisis that erupts when the boy first meets the real world.

The opening of the book recounts Lepsius’s daring theft of a Coptic-inscribed stele from an Abyssinian island monastery, a raid that sparks violence and scandal. Back in London, unable to decode the last, crucial words, he vows to “make a man” who can: he marries Molly O’Hara, and after her death in childbirth, raises their son Hannibal on the island of Shunter within a carefully faked “world” that exalts an idealized “Man.” Nineteen years on, Hannibal proves preternaturally skilled yet emotionally stunted; when given the stele he reads nearly all but fails at the final three words, asks for time, and disappears the same day as a yacht touches the island. A shift to the yacht’s maid, Jeanne Auvache, shows the runaway youth secretly boarding, binding and gagging her, and urgently demanding marriage and secrecy—revealing his strange innocence and the first collision between the lie-built prodigy and society. (This is an automatically generated summary.)  pOriginally published:cLondon: T. Werner Laurie, 1908  aYoung men -- Fiction  aSpeculative fiction4 uhttps://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.3011200273902440uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77484  c118204d118204