The Robinsons leave their home in Switzerland planning to settle half a world away. But things do not turn out as they had expected. The sole survivors of a terrible shipwreck, they wash ashore to learn that the danger has only begun. Their new world will test their courage, cleverness, endurance, and faith as they struggle to survive and create a civilization of their own in the wilderness.

Jules Verne declared that The Swiss Family Robinson was one of his favorite books. He liked it so much that he decided to write a sequel entitled The Castaways of the Flag, published in 1900, many years after Wyss's death.