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 3 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIn the winter of 1940 German troops arrive in a small Norwegian village and take it over, and nobody there expects to be able to do anything about it. Then Peter Lindstrom's uncle explains what the children can do with their sleds, and a plan begins that puts the country's gold bullion and their own lives on the same sled run down the hill.
Rating coming soonCarruthers is a junior diplomat in London with a dull summer ahead of him when a friend invites him to spend a holiday sailing in the Baltic. The invitation is really a request for help: Davies has found something in the German sands that suggests a plan for an invasion of England, and he needs someone who can read a chart and understand the politics.
Rating coming soonThe gates left behind by the civilisation that made the protomolecule have opened the way to a thousand worlds, and the rush to settle them has started. On the first of those colonies a small group of Belters who arrived first and a corporate survey party sent by the charter are arguing about who owns the ground, and the ship that made the gates available has been asked to keep the peace.
Rating coming soonMaximum Ride is fourteen and she and the rest of the flock, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel, look like ordinary children except that they have wings and can fly. When Angel, the youngest of them, is taken back to the laboratory where the group was created, the others set out across Death Valley to get her home again.
Rating coming soonA disease has killed or changed everyone over the age of fourteen, and the children left behind are trying to stay alive in a London where the grown-ups they knew have become something else. A group travelling across the city towards a promised shelter has to work out who to trust among the survivors they meet on the way.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson saved the world more than once, and now he wants to finish his senior year of school and get into university like anybody else his age. The gods have other plans, and the letter of recommendation he needs from Mount Olympus can only be earned by completing three more quests for them, starting with one that somebody else has already made a mess of.
Rating coming soonA tour bus comes off the road in a snowstorm in South Dakota and leaves Jack Reacher stranded in a small town with a prison, a police force stretched thin and a witness who is waiting to give evidence. Sixty-one hours is the time he has, and the countdown runs the length of the book.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is fourteen and has just come back from space, and when he crash lands off the coast of Australia the Australian Secret Service recruits him to infiltrate one of the criminal gangs operating across South East Asia. The gangs are known as snakeheads, and they smuggle drugs, weapons and people through the region for a living.
Rating coming soonJulian, Dick and Anne arrive at Kirrin Cottage to spend the holidays with their cousin George, and their plans for the island are ruined when Aunt Fanny falls ill and has to go away to hospital. The temporary cook who comes to look after them is unfriendly to the children and actively unkind to George's dog.
Rating coming soonSundew has wanted to destroy the HiveWings since she was old enough to understand what they did to her tribe, and it is the whole purpose of her life. The LeafWings survive only in the Poison Jungle, a place dangerous enough to have kept them safe, and Sundew has to decide what the war costs the people she is fighting for.
Rating coming soonThe four nations have settled on Yun as the next Avatar after years of searching, and then a demonstration of bending by Kyoshi, who is Yun's friend and servant, throws the whole identification into doubt. With the identity of the true Avatar at stake, Kyoshi and her friend Rangi flee the mansion where they have been living and go on the run together.
Rating coming soonCHERUB needs to reach an illegal weapons dealer, and the only route open to them is through his son, who is serving a sentence in a maximum security prison in the United States. The plan requires an agent to get inside the prison and make contact, which is more complicated than anyone in the organisation wants to admit.
Rating coming soonA young villager in a world built out of blocks has been keeping a diary of his attempts to become a warrior instead of the farmer everyone expects him to be. The sixth book of the journal takes him further into the working life of the village, where the skills he has been practising are needed for something larger than his own training.
Rating coming soonSophie Foster wants answers about who she is and what was done to her, and she has learned that the truth about her own past is the most dangerous thing she could go looking for. She is not the only one with gaps in her history, and the people around her have family secrets of their own.
Rating coming soonHenry Montague was raised to be a gentleman and has spent his life avoiding it, with the gambling halls and the late nights and the company of whoever he pleased. His father's last attempt at reform is a grand tour of Europe with his best friend and his sister, and the tour goes wrong almost immediately when somebody else's property ends up in his hands.
Rating coming soonTorak is twelve and living in the forest with his father in the Stone Age when a bear possessed by something evil kills the man and leaves the boy alone. He is joined by an orphaned wolf cub, and the two of them have to travel north to find help before the same creature finds them again.
Rating coming soonA party of wealthy and engaged English travellers sets out on a world voyage aboard an ocean liner, and after several weeks at sea the ship is wrecked in the Pacific. Two survivors reach an island whose inhabitants call it Nedra, and being alone together on it, far from the marriages waiting at home, is a problem of its own.
Rating coming soonMarooned on the coast of equatorial Africa, the English couple John and Alice Clayton die within a year of their son's birth, and the baby is adopted by the she-ape Kala. Named Tarzan, he grows up among the apes, teaches himself to read from the books in his parents' cabin, and eventually meets creatures that look like him and speak a language he has never heard.
Rating coming soonJake is an ordinary kid in an ordinary suburb until a creature from space finds him and his friends and gives them a power nobody should have: the ability to take the shape of any animal they touch. The five of them become the Animorphs, and the enemy they are up against has already been living among the people they know.
Rating coming soonSmall Sam and the Kid have reached the Tower of London, where Jordan Hordern's crew offers food, walls and friendship, and Sam cannot settle. All he wants is his sister Ella, and despite everyone's objections he sets out west through the no-go zone with the Kid beside him, while a hunter called Shadowman tracks a man building an army.
Rating coming soonThe sickness took the adults of London, rotting their minds first and their bodies afterwards, and what is left of them now hunts the streets of the city. The Holloway crew have fought their way across town to the Natural History Museum, and their next trip out for medical supplies asks them whether humans are a greater danger than the creatures.
Rating coming soonWill Andrews leaves Harvard in the 1870s, persuaded by the writing of Emerson that a man should find an original relation to nature, and travels west. In the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing he falls in with a hunter who tells him about a vast herd hidden away in the Colorado mountains, and puts up the money to join an expedition that goes after it.
Rating coming soonEcho Sackett has never been far from her Tennessee home until the day she sets out for Philadelphia to collect an inheritance left to her family. She is sixteen, she can handle herself as well as any of the Sackett men, and the city lawyer who means to take the money from her has no idea what he has taken on.
Rating coming soonWhen Yance Sackett's sister-in-law is taken from her home, the family has one response. Yance and his brother Kin leave their Carolina settlement and ride north into country they do not know, following the men who took her and expecting to be welcome nowhere along the way. They are travelling towards a frontier where kidnapping, the slave trade and the claims of the nations whose land they cross all have to be answered.
Rating coming soonTwenty children are living at a boarding school in the French countryside during the German occupation, and they agree to hide ten Jewish children among them. When soldiers come to the school with questions, the arithmetic of the arrangement becomes a matter of life and death for everybody in the building, and the youngest of them are the ones who have to keep their answers straight.
Rating coming soonAn advertisement appears in the newspaper asking whether the reader is a gifted child looking for special opportunities, and dozens of children answer it. Only four pass the strange tests that follow, and the four of them are then sent into a school run by a man named Curtain to find out who is sending secret messages into people's minds.
Rating coming soonThere is a thief at Kirrin Cottage, and the Famous Five are sure they know who it is and quite unable to prove it. What they need is evidence, and what they find is an old map and a hiding place nobody has thought to look in, which is enough to take the investigation all the way to the person actually responsible.
Rating coming soonBetsy Bobbin and Hank the mule are shipwrecked on the coast of Oz and fall in with an army on the march. Ann Soforth, the Queen of Oogaboo, has decided to conquer the Nome King, and she has the clockwork man Tik-Tok to help her do it. He can think, speak and act, but only while his springs are wound.
Rating coming soonIt is twenty-four hours since Max Ride and the other bird-kids escaped the New York Institute, and they are still running. There are six of them, 98 per cent human and 2 per cent bird, and they came away with information that might tell them where their parents are, if they can work out what the garbled words and numbers mean.
Rating coming soonIn July 1916, Chet Roscow is fascinated by the newspaper reports of a great white shark attacking people along the New Jersey shore, not far from the town where he is living. He reads the accounts the way a boy reads a ghost story, until the day he goes swimming in Matawan Creek himself.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is hitching rides across the country when he accepts a lift from a man, a woman and a boy he does not know, in a car whose story does not add up. By the time the car reaches Virginia he is caught up in a conspiracy he never agreed to join, and the people running it have worked out that he is the biggest problem they have.
Rating coming soonFor centuries dragons have told stories about another continent across the ocean, a land populated by tribes very different from the ones they know. There has never been any proof and most dragons have dismissed the stories as fairy tales, which leaves one young dragon with a grand story, a nobody's name and a decision to make.
Rating coming soonFor years Grace has watched the wolves that live in the woods behind the house, and she has been drawn to one of them in particular: a yellow-eyed wolf who watches her back with an attention of his own. Then a local boy is killed by wolves and the town's hunters go into the woods after the pack.
Rating coming soonEnola Holmes is the much younger sister of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and she has been brought up quietly in the country by a mother who does not care what the neighbours think. On her fourteenth birthday her mother disappears, leaving a small amount of money and no explanation, and Enola's older brothers arrive to arrange her future.
Rating coming soonTom Barton and his uncle Jack are smugglers, and they are good at it: quick wits, a fast vessel and secret cargo holds have kept them ahead of the authorities for years. What they are carrying through Europe in the 1500s is more dangerous than the goods they usually run, and the people who want it stopped have the power of the law behind them.
Rating coming soonLucas loves football more than anything except Benny, his father's friend, who is a firefighter and a former football player. When his parents decide the sport is too dangerous and tell him to stop, Lucas goes to the one person who will understand, and he happens to be in New York on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has taken fairy technology and built a computer far beyond anything the human world can produce. Then he shows it off to an American businessman, who simply takes it from him, and the only way to get it back is to work alongside the fairies he has spent years outwitting and robbing blind.
Rating coming soonMichael Vey has a secret he cannot show to anyone: he can send a current of electricity through his hands. When an organisation with its own interest in people like him starts watching him closely, Michael and his friends have to work out what it wants from them, and then it takes his mother.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is on Mars with the woman he loves imprisoned in a place he cannot reach, held there by a religion's rules rather than by walls. He has a year to find a way in, and the planet's politics, its warring nations and its strange temples all stand between him and her.
Rating coming soonA castaway wakes on the shore of an island with no memory of how they arrived and no idea where they are. The world works by rules that nobody explains, and staying alive means working those rules out one experiment at a time, from what can be eaten to what comes out after dark, while the island keeps its own secrets.
Rating coming soonChristina Wakefield is seventeen when the promise of adventure takes her to the Arabian desert, and she is captured soon after arriving there. The man holding her is a sheikh known as Abu, and she has met him before under another name in England, which complicates a situation in which she has no power at all and no way of getting home.
Rating coming soonTara, princess of Helium and daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, has suitors she has no patience for, and Gahan, jed of the city-state of Gathol, is one of them; her first impression of him is that he is vain and decorative. Then a storm catches her flier and drives it far beyond the country she knows, and she is taken captive in a region where the name of Helium carries no weight at all. The fifth Barsoom novel follows a princess who has to survive on her own.
Rating coming soonDon Harvey is taken out of his New Mexico boarding school in the middle of term so that he can join his parents on Mars, and the headmaster suggests the real reason is the prospect of war. Before he leaves, an old friend of the family asks him to deliver a ring to his father, which is how Don becomes the carrier of something he does not understand. He is arrested, released after the ring has been examined, and told that his friend has died of heart failure.
Rating coming soonSharrow once led a personality-attuned combat team through one of the small commercial wars fought in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now the Huhsz, a religious cult, holds that its messiah cannot be born until her family's female line has ended, and it has been granted permission to kill her. Her only way out is to find the last Lazy Gun, an ancient weapon of enormous destructive power that her own ancestor stole from the cult, before the Huhsz find her first.
Rating coming soonAdrana and Arafura Ness are sisters with a rare talent for bone reading, the art by which ships in this far-future system speak to one another. The skill gets them taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a vessel whose captain, Pol Rackamore, makes his living cracking open the hidden, booby-trapped worlds that hold the relics of older civilisations. While the crew is hunting one of those baubles, the notorious pirate Bosa Sennen attacks them and separates the sisters.
Rating coming soonThe warhammer Aegis-fang has ended up in the hands of the pirate captain Sheila Kree, and Wulfgar is following her. When Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions leave Mithral Hall in search of Wulfgar, they find themselves on the trail of the hammer as well, a path that will lead them to a reunion and to the last battle for the heart and soul of their friend.
Rating coming soonSantiago is an ageing fisherman in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, and his luck has run out: he has gone a long time without a catch. He sets out alone once more and hooks a giant marlin that takes him far out to sea and into a struggle lasting for days. The story is also the story of a young boy, Manolin, who has been taught by the old man and cares about him.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson is thirteen and his parents are divorced. He is flying north in a bush plane to spend the summer with his father when the pilot has a heart attack and the plane goes down, leaving Brian alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a hatchet his mother gave him. He has to work out how to stay alive.
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