Movement and risk: voyages that go wrong, expeditions past the last map, chases across a continent and the older stories that made the form. 324 books so far, across 90 series, plus 173 titles with no series listed. This is page 2 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonSeparated from their friend Quigley by a waterfall in the Mortmain Mountains, the Baudelaire orphans come aboard a submarine called the Queequeg, whose captain is hunting a sugar bowl he refuses to describe. The trail leads into a grotto where a fungus grows that can kill anyone who breathes it, and the children have to judge how far the crew around them can be trusted.
Rating coming soonThe Baudelaire orphans travel to a hotel that is meant to be the last safe gathering place for the noble side of the organisation their parents served. Kit Snicket, who is pregnant, leaves the three of them there disguised as concierges with instructions to watch the guests and work out who is on which side, but the hotel is run by identical twins whose loyalties do not match.
Rating coming soonEmily, Navin and the resistance fighters they have joined leave on an airship to look for the lost city of Cielis, hoping to find the Guardian Council and the Stonekeepers who might be able to help them. Time is short, because the Elf King is hunting Emily as well, and the survival of their world depends on reaching the city first.
Rating coming soonLionkit, Hollykit and Jaykit belong to ThunderClan and are the grandchildren of its leader, Firestar. A prophecy given at the end of the previous arc says that three cats of his line will hold the power of the stars in their paws, and as the three are made apprentices the Clans begin to argue about which cats belong among them and which do not.
Rating coming soonMenolly, a young musician who keeps nine fire lizards of her own, arrives at the Harper Hall on Pern to begin training as a harper. She is the first girl ever apprenticed there, the Masters disagree about whether she should be taught at all, and the students she has to live with resent her for being different.
Rating coming soonPollyanna Whittier is eleven and newly orphaned when she is sent to live with her aunt in the town of Beldingsville. Aunt Polly is wealthy, strict and has no idea what to do with a niece, while Pollyanna arrives with a game her father taught her: finding something to be glad about in whatever happens.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is in hospital recovering from a bullet wound when four men break in to kidnap the son of a Russian billionaire. He stops them, and the boy's father, Nikolei Drevin, rewards him with two weeks at his side. Drevin is building a hotel in space called Ark Angel, and a group calling itself Force Three is determined to see the project destroyed.
Rating coming soonClayton Blaisdell Jr, known as Blaze, is a small-time con artist with a damaged head and a dead partner he still talks to. George Rackley planned their crimes while he was alive, and Blaze means to carry out the scheme the two of them worked up together: taking the baby son of a wealthy family and holding him until a ransom is paid.
Rating coming soonSnowfall is queen of the IceWings while still young, and she has a plan for keeping her tribe safe: nobody comes in and nobody leaves. Then a storm drives a crowd of unfamiliar dragons onto her shore asking for somewhere to stay, and the newcomers are in no state to be sent away again, so she has to work out what her rules are worth.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is hitching through the heat of West Texas when a young woman named Carmen Greer offers him a lift. She wants something in return: her husband is about to leave prison, he has beaten her before, the local police cannot be trusted, and the ranch he is coming home to belongs to his family, which owns everything around it.
Rating coming soonAhsoka Tano left the Jedi Order before the Clone Wars ended, and the purge that followed left her with nothing to belong to. Living under an assumed name, she avoids the Force and the lightsabers she still carries, until the Empire's reach into a small community forces her to choose between staying hidden and helping the people she has come to know.
Rating coming soonThe four warrior Clans have shared the land around the lake as equals for many seasons. A prophecy says that three ThunderClan cats will hold the power of the stars in their paws, and two of them already know who they are, but the identity of the third is still hidden. Two young sisters are preparing to take their apprentice names.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher watches a man walk out of a New York building, cross the street to a parked Mercedes and drive it away. The car was carrying one million dollars in ransom money, and the man who paid it, Edward Lane, will find more where that came from to get his family back. Lane runs a soldiers-for-hire operation, and he means to have his wife and child returned whatever it costs him.
Rating coming soonA history teacher at a California high school cannot answer his students when they ask why ordinary Germans went along with the Nazi party, so he sets out to show them. The experiment he runs gives the class a slogan, a salute and a uniform way of behaving, and it does not stay inside his classroom.
Rating coming soonMinli lives in the Village of Fruitless Mountain, where the ground is too hard to farm and the families have very little. She loves the stories her father tells at the table, which her mother cannot stand, and she is always ready to go looking for something better. The mountain is not only a mountain: it is the broken heart of an immortal dragon.
Rating coming soonFirestar's three grandchildren now know about the prophecy that describes their future, and each of them wants something different from it. Lionpaw wants to be unbeatable in battle, Hollypaw wants to lead, and Jaypaw believes that only he can see what has happened and what is coming. Their strengths are tested when ThunderClan is attacked without warning.
Rating coming soonDirk Pitt of the National Underwater and Marine Agency is called away from California to the North Atlantic, where a luxury yacht that vanished years earlier has been found frozen inside an iceberg. The yacht had been on its way to a secret meeting, and when Pitt tunnels into the ice he finds the crew dead at their posts and the cargo gone.
Rating coming soonBilly and Sheena spend their summers with their uncle, Dr Deep, on his boat, and they have learned to expect adventure every time. This trip turns into a treasure hunt, and what they find at the end of it is a sea captain who died two hundred years ago and has not stayed dead. Then the trail leads to HorrorLand.
Rating coming soonIn a world where most people develop a superpower at the age of four, Izuku Midoriya has none. He wants to be a hero anyway, which means getting into a school that takes only the most powerful students, and an encounter with the greatest hero alive gives him a chance he had given up on.
Rating coming soonAn eight-year-old girl lives on a farm in the English countryside next door to the Gregg family, who spend their time hunting. She is angry about it, and when her anger gets the better of her she points her magic finger at them, and something happens to the Greggs that none of them expected.
Rating coming soonTaran works as Assistant Pig-Keeper at Caer Dallben and would rather be doing something heroic. His charge is Hen Wen, the only oracular pig in Prydain, and when she runs off he follows her, which takes him further from home than he has ever been and into the middle of a war. The series was inspired by Welsh mythology and by the castles and language of a country the author had seen during the war.
Rating coming soonAn Englishman sets out on a series of voyages, is shipwrecked and ends up alone on an island off the coast of South America. He stays there for twenty-eight years, building what he can out of what the wreck gives him and meeting other people only rarely and late in the book.
Rating coming soonIchabod Crane is a schoolmaster in a small Hudson Valley village, and he is superstitious to a degree his neighbours find entertaining. He is also in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and one night on the road home he meets a horseman with no head. The village has its legends, and he believes all of them.
Rating coming soonApollo has been turned into a mortal teenager and is working his way through five dead oracles in the hope of getting back what he lost. His journey takes him to Camp Jupiter, where the Roman demigods are preparing for a last stand against three Roman emperors. The book is the fourth of the five volumes about his time on earth.
Rating coming soonNimona is a shapeshifter who presents herself to Lord Ballister Blackheart as a sidekick, and he is a disgraced knight with a grudge against the Institute that runs the kingdom. The two of them set out to ruin it, with very different ideas about what is allowed. The story concerns a villain, the institution that decides who the heroes are, and a shapeshifter who follows no rules at all.
Rating coming soonApollo is still serving his sentence as a mortal teenager called Lester, with a demigod daughter of Demeter assigned to keep him company, and he still has to restore five dark oracles before he can go home. The third of those requires finding a Roman emperor in a maze. Apollo has to go through the Labyrinth to reach him, and he has none of his old powers to help.
Rating coming soonThree children are on holiday in the West Country when they find a country estate that looks like a castle out of a fairy tale. In a maze in the rose garden they come across a sleeping princess, who is a girl playing a game, and a ring that makes whoever wears it invisible.
Rating coming soonAdam has just moved to a small town he thinks is called Springville, until a girl named Sally tells him that its real name is Spooksville and that the stories about it are true. She and a boy called Watch take him looking for the Secret Path, which leads to other versions of the town.
Rating coming soonA tenth-century Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, is sent north and falls in with a company of Vikings, who take him with them to a settlement that is being attacked by something nobody can describe. The account of the journey is presented as his manuscript, and the second half of the book retells the story of Beowulf.
Rating coming soonFireheart is deputy of ThunderClan, carrying the clan's decisions while its leader is unwell. A rival leader across the forest has grown more powerful and more willing to use that power, and something has come into the woods that is killing prey and leaving the remains where no clan would put them.
Rating coming soonThe crew of the Rocinante has time on its hands while the ship sits in dock, and each of them goes off to deal with something personal. Meanwhile a radical faction has been stealing stealth technology from Martian shipyards, which turns out to be the first sign of a plan aimed at the whole of humanity.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar are travelling west along the Great Mother River, away from the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and towards the country Jondalar was born in. The journey crosses the territories of many peoples, each with its own customs and its own way of treating strangers, and the two of them have to find a way through all of them.
Rating coming soonJack's aunt must sell the family house and it still is not enough to clear her debts. Twelve-year-old Jack sails for California to find gold, taking the family butler with him, and the two of them discover that a gold rush is far more crowded, far more expensive and a great deal less glamorous than they had imagined it.
Rating coming soonProfessor William Waterman Sherman sets out to cross the Pacific alone in a balloon, intending to spend a year by himself above the ocean. Three weeks later he is pulled out of the Atlantic surrounded by the wreckage of twenty balloons, and the account he gives of how he got there makes up the rest of the novel.
Rating coming soonJemmy is an orphan kept in a palace for one purpose: whenever Prince Horace misbehaves, Jemmy is punished in his place. He has learned to read, write and do mathematics while living in the castle, he is beaten several times a day, and he would rather be back out on the streets that he came from.
Rating coming soonThe battle of Thermopylae is told by Xeones, a free non-citizen of Sparta who is one of only three Greeks to come out of the pass alive. He describes how he came to Sparta, what he was taught there, and what the three hundred did in the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea.
Rating coming soonThe Wart is a boy being raised in the household of Sir Ector, with no idea that he is anyone important. When the magician Merlyn arrives to tutor him and Sir Ector's son Kay, the lessons turn into a series of transformations into fish, hawks, badgers and snakes, none of which quite explain what the magician is preparing him for.
Rating coming soonIt is 1799 and Richard Sharpe is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot, serving in southern India, with a talent for trouble and no prospect of promotion. Sent into the enemy camp in disguise, he finds himself in a siege that will make a hero out of a soldier the army would rather forget.
Rating coming soonArthur Gordon Pym stows away on a whaling ship leaving Nantucket with a friend's help, and finds himself trapped below deck with almost no water and no way of getting out. What follows is a voyage of mutiny, shipwreck and hunger, a rescue by another vessel, and a journey further south than any ship had gone before, towards ice and a coast that the account breaks off before reaching.
Rating coming soonAn expedition travels into the interior of Africa in search of a lost civilisation, and finds one: a kingdom ruled by a queen who has not aged in centuries and who is not pleased to be found. The explorers are confronted with a power they cannot reason with and a history that includes one of their own family.
Rating coming soonRichard Shelton is a young man in the England of the Wars of the Roses, and the guardian who is supposed to protect him and his inheritance is not to be trusted. When a black arrow carries a threat of vengeance into the forest, Richard has to work out who killed his father and which side of the war he belongs to.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl is twelve, a criminal by choice and the richest boy in Ireland, and he has a problem he cannot solve with money: his father is missing, and the trail leads to a kidnapping in the Arctic. At the same time the fairies he robbed in the first book need his help with a goblin uprising, and neither side is used to asking for anything.
Rating coming soonGregor is eleven and his little sister is not quite two when they fall through a grate in their apartment building's laundry room and end up in an underground world. There the inhabitants are waiting for them, because an old prophecy describes a quest that two people from above the ground are supposed to finish, and the boy from the laundry room is not pleased that anybody has decided that this is his job.
Rating coming soonA prophecy has named three cats, kin to the leader of ThunderClan, as the ones who will hold the power of the stars, and only one of them knows it. Jaypaw believes the answer is buried in the past, with the ancestors who walk through his dreams, and his search takes him and his littermates towards the mountains.
Rating coming soonTom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are on their way downriver when a strange man asks them to carry a message to a relative in Arkansas. By the time they arrive there has been a murder, a stolen diamond and a confession nobody believes, and Tom decides to solve the case the way the detective stories he has read say it should be done.
Rating coming soonAna Dakkar is in her first year at a school that trains marine scientists, naval officers and underwater explorers, and both her parents died on a research voyage for the same institution. On the day of her first trial at sea the school is attacked, and Ana and her classmates find out what the school's founder actually left them.
Rating coming soonLila's father makes fireworks for a king, and Lila wants to be a maker herself rather than a daughter who is married off. Told that she must find the Royal Sulphur from the sacred volcano of the Goddess of Fire to earn the title, she sets off through a country far to the east with her friend Chulak and a talking white elephant for company.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson survived fifty-four days alone in the Canadian wilderness, and the experience has left him different in ways he cannot explain to anyone who was not there. Now a government team wants him to do it again, deliberately and with observers and supplies close by, so that they can study what living that way does to a person.
Adventure is about what the characters do rather than how they feel about it. A book lands here when the engine of the story is a journey, a pursuit, a wreck, a frontier or a plan that has to be carried out in a dangerous place, and when the reader is meant to want the next page for the sake of finding out what the world does next.
That covers sea stories and naval adventure, wilderness survival, desert and polar exploration, treasure hunts, captivity and escape, aviation and mountain stories, and the frontier and western novels where the landscape is the antagonist. Historical adventure belongs on this shelf and on the historical fiction shelf when the period is doing real work, and a survival story with a scientific premise can also sit on the science fiction shelf.
The shelf keeps the older adventure canon alongside contemporary writing, because the form was built by those books and they are still the ones most readers meet first. What it avoids is a plot summary that gives away the journey: the page says where the characters are going and what stands in the way, not where they end up.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 books