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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe narrator travels to Peru in search of an ancient manuscript that is said to hold a sequence of insights into the way human beings might live, and he is not the only person looking for it. The book presents itself as an adventure in pursuit of a spiritual mystery, and it is written as a first-person account of a spiritual awakening in which the manuscript's insights are discovered one at a time.
Rating coming soonCharlotte Davis is seventeen and has already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime: her father and the river, her best friend, and any real support from her mother. She has learned how to forget, and she has learned to cut. The novel follows her as she is taken out of the life she has been surviving and begins the slow and uneven work of putting herself back together.
Rating coming soonThe nuclear submarine Starbuck sailed into the calm Pacific for sea trials, fully armed and with all hands aboard, and vanished: no wreckage, no signals and no survivors. Dirk Pitt, a maritime troubleshooter, finds the only clue in the shark-torn surf off Hawaii, in the form of the submarine's own log, which ends with a warning that searching for the crew can only end in vain. The trail leads towards a whirlpool in the deep.
Rating coming soonRichard Hannay comes back to London from Rhodesia with a modest fortune and nothing to do, and a neighbour in his building tells him about a plot to throw Europe into war. Days later Hannay finds the man dead in his flat and becomes both the obvious suspect and the next target. He goes on the run across Scotland with the police behind him and the conspirators ahead, knowing only a set of numbers.
Rating coming soonThis is a retelling of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of the legend that has grown around Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The story is told through the voices of the people who were there, in a deliberately Elizabethan style, and the character the book is named after is only one figure among many.
Rating coming soonThe Zane family's settlement at Wheeling, on the Virginia frontier, is the furthest American outpost in that country, and in 1782 it comes under attack by Native American and Loyalist forces. The novel follows the family through the years of the Revolution, and the youngest daughter, Betty, whose own part in the defence is remembered in the family's history.
Rating coming soonA wave takes Mau's island village and everyone in it, and it leaves him and a girl from the other side of the world as the only people left on the island. She is called Daphne, she was on a ship when the wave came, and between them they have to work out how to live somewhere that has lost every adult who knew how anything was done.
Rating coming soonThe Soviet Union and the United States exchange nuclear strikes, and the small Florida town of Fort Repose is left standing but cut off. There is no electricity, no fuel and no supplies coming in, and the people who live there have to work out how to keep going with what is in the shops, the gardens and the river.
Rating coming soonMiyax is thirteen, and she has run away from her husband's parents' house with the idea of reaching the coast and travelling to San Francisco. Instead she is lost on the tundra of the Alaska North Slope with nothing to eat, and the only others out there are a pack of wolves whose habits she has to learn in order to live.
Rating coming soonFelix has been in a Catholic orphanage in Poland for more than three years, and he believes his parents are coming back for him. When he sees the nuns burning the library's books, he decides to go and find them, and the journey takes him through a country where the danger in the streets is not the sort of thing he has been told about.
Rating coming soonSeth Wearing drowns in the sea off the coast of his home town, and then he wakes up on an empty street in a town that looks like the one he grew up in and has nobody else in it. He is naked, thirsty and starving, and he has no idea whether he is dead, dreaming or somewhere that has been arranged for him.
Rating coming soonBefore the maze, there was the world's end: forests burnt, rivers dried, the oceans swollen, and then a plague that spread across the globe until families were dying and people were killing each other. Then came WICKED, an organisation looking for a way out of it, and the children it collected in order to find one.
Rating coming soonThe warrior cats have lived in peace around the lake for many moons, but a shadow is gathering on the edge of their territories and the clans are not ready for it. One young cat is given a message that points beyond everything the clans have mapped, and following it means leaving behind the only country he has ever known.
Rating coming soonUnwinding is legal: difficult teenagers can be taken apart, and their organs and limbs given to other people. The revolt at a harvest camp made the practice impossible to ignore, and the three young people who escaped it are now the most wanted fugitives in the country, with a movement growing behind them and a system that needs them caught.
Rating coming soonThe Raxter School for Girls has been under quarantine for eighteen months, since the Tox arrived and began changing the island the school stands on. The teachers died first, the girls began to change next, and the supplies the navy brings are only just enough. Hetty is waiting for her friend Byatt to come back from the infirmary.
Rating coming soonThe dead rose on the battlefields of Gettysburg and the American Civil War stopped before it could be won. In the country that emerged, safety depends on a few people doing dangerous work, and the laws require Black and Native American children to attend combat schools to learn how to put the dead back down.
Rating coming soonJack Sullivan is a foster child who has been left behind by the end of the world, and he has decided to make the best of it: a fortified tree house, unlimited junk food and video games, and a monster or two to deal with now and then. What he does not have is company, so he sets out to find some.
Rating coming soonPeak Marcello is fourteen and already known in climbing circles for getting to the top of skyscrapers and bridges in New York, which is how he ends up in court. His father, who left years ago, turns up with a way out of the charges and a proposition: come to Nepal and take a run at the highest mountain in the world.
Rating coming soonOllie has been reading a book of ghost stories since her mother died, and the story she keeps returning to is about a girl called Beth, two brothers who loved her, and a bargain with something called the smiling man. Then her school bus breaks down beside a farm, and the story stops being something she is reading.
Rating coming soonParvana is eleven and lives in a one-room flat in Kabul with her family, and since the Taliban took the city she has rarely been outside. Her father, the person who could go out, is arrested, and the family has no man to send to the market. To feed them Parvana has to become something the authorities will allow in the street.
Rating coming soonOn a planet where violence and vengeance are the ordinary business of government, every person develops a currentgift when they come of age, and most of the gifts are useful. Akos and Cyra are not so lucky: his gift makes him unable to bear the pain of others, and hers gives pain to everyone who touches her, including herself.
Rating coming soonJames Bond is sent to Jamaica to find out what happened to the head of the British intelligence station there, and he arrives expecting something close to a holiday. The centipede left in his hotel room disposes of that idea, and everything he looks into on the island leads him towards a recluse with steel pincers for hands.
Rating coming soonLee Scoresby lands his balloon at Novy Odense, a cold port in the north where a businessman and a politician between them intend to decide how the place is run. Lee takes the side of a sea captain who has been robbed of his cargo, and the help he gets comes from an unexpected direction: an armoured bear.
Rating coming soonOne ordinary afternoon, every machine in sixteen-year-old Adam's school computer lab stops working, and the problem turns out to be far larger than an outage: cars will not start, phones are dead, and the blackout spreads. Only Adam's ancient car still runs, and the drive home shows him how quickly an ordinary suburb can turn dangerous once the power, the traffic and the information all stop at once.
Rating coming soonDean misses his bus on the morning a monster hailstorm, and then a chemical spill, wreck the road outside a chain superstore. He and thirteen other young people end up sealed inside the store with no adults, limited supplies and no idea whether anyone is coming for them. Their refuge runs on rations, chores and a chain of command that will not hold forever.
Rating coming soonTwo children, one date, eighteen years apart, and neither of them knows that the other exists. In New York in September 2001, Brandon is visiting his father's office on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center when an airliner strikes the tower. In Afghanistan in 2019, Reshmina dreams of school and a quiet life, and a battle reaches her village.
Rating coming soonLucky has always been a Lone Dog, surviving on the city's streets by instinct and keeping away from Leashed Dogs and their owners. Then the Big Growl, a devastating earthquake, flattens the city, and he has to work out how to live with a pack of frightened former pets who have lost everything. Water runs short, the weather turns, and the pack must decide what it is willing to do to survive.
Rating coming soonStorm has worked out which dog betrayed the Pack, but coming back from exile has put her straight into the traitor's hands. Held prisoner in the Wild Pack's camp, she is short of allies and shorter of time, and saving the dogs she grew up with means finishing what the traitor started. The pack she left is divided, and every dog in the camp is a possible enemy.
Rating coming soonSarah came from Maine to the prairie to marry Papa, and she has never stopped missing what she knew first. In a summer of drought, fires and thirsty coyotes she takes Anna and Caleb back east where they will be safe, leaving Papa behind with the farm he will not abandon. Anna wonders whether the family will ever be together again.
Rating coming soonJess is stranded in the woods with a dog, a few supplies and winter on the way. Her survival skills are limited, physical work is difficult for her, and nobody knows where she is. She was left there on purpose by the man who killed her father, and she intends to survive long enough to answer for it.
Rating coming soonMaddie's father is a Secret Service agent and Logan is the president's son, and they were best friends until the day her family disappeared to a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with no phone and no internet. Six years later Logan turns up unannounced, and so do the armed men hunting him, which leaves the two of them alone in the frozen bush.
Rating coming soonA pulse of electromagnetic energy sweeps across the sky and kills most of the people on earth, and those who survive are changed. Alex, already living with an incurable brain tumour, finds her senses sharpened far beyond human range, and she takes up with a soldier back from Afghanistan and an angry eight-year-old girl who has lost her family.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson survived alone in the northern wilderness, and now he is back in ordinary life, where high school makes no sense to him at all. He feels more isolated in a crowded corridor than he ever did in the woods. The only answer he can see is to go back to the country where he knew how to live.
Rating coming soonIn the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release an unstoppable army. The army consists of hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises with two clear objectives, and nobody in the wider world knows anything about what has happened in the town. Austin is trying to write the whole thing down.
Rating coming soonBen is a shy and lonely six-year-old living on the Canadian prairie, and he is different from the rest of his family. When he wanders away from the farm and gets lost, he spends a summer in the open country under the protection of a badger, and the arrangement keeps him alive while his parents search for him.
Rating coming soonAbel is a very civilized mouse with a comfortable life and a wife he adores, until a storm carries him away and leaves him marooned on an uninhabited island. His resourcefulness and his endurance are tested to the limit as he works out how to live there and how to get home to Amanda.
Rating coming soonJulie returns to her father's Eskimo village in the Alaskan Arctic, where she has to find a way to save the wolves she loves and to persuade the people around her that the animals should be spared. She falls in love with a young Siberian man, and the world she grew up in is changing faster than anyone in the village expected.
Rating coming soonSix teenagers in California have powers that ordinary people do not. Ethan's ability is a voice inside him that says whatever the person listening most wants to hear, which is useful until it starts talking during a bank robbery. The only people who can help him are the other Zeroes, who are no longer friends.
Rating coming soonIvy Westfall was married to the President's son as part of the settlement between the winning and losing sides of a war, and given a mission: to kill her new husband. She fell in love with him instead, and now she has been exiled beyond the fence, into the country outside the settlement where nothing is provided for her.
Rating coming soonFifteen-year-old Jessie and six companions from an outdoor education program take the company's rafting gear without permission and set off down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There are no adults, no permit and no river map, and the first days on the water are the best time any of the seven of them have ever had.
Rating coming soonTella is competing in the Brimstone Bleed to win the Cure that could save her brother's life, and the race has reached its final stage. She must face the dangers of the ocean, the cold of a mountain and a set of rules that have been rewritten to make the surviving competitors distrust each other.
Rating coming soonLucky and the Leashed Dogs find a forest with prey and fresh water and believe they have found their new home, but a fierce pack of wild dogs has already claimed the territory. Their leader will not allow other dogs to settle, and Lucky is forced to work behind enemy lines. He understands both packs, so whichever side he chooses he betrays dogs he knows.
Rating coming soonThe Wild Pack's ruthless Alpha has agreed to let the Leashed Dogs join him, but not before he learns that Lucky has been spying on him, and Lucky is cast out. He tries to enjoy his freedom, but the world after the Big Growl is dangerous for a dog on his own. For the first time since the disaster, he wants company.
Rating coming soonOn a beach walk during a family holiday, Beth Anderson finds something that looks like a skull and remembers the retired couple who vanished from the island's coast months earlier. A stranger approaches, she panics and covers it up, and when she returns the skull has gone. Her brother treats the story as entertainment, and the other holidaymakers agree with him.
Rating coming soonFour friends from a Georgia city drive into the mountains for a last canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River, a wild stretch of water that is about to be dammed. Lewis Medlock, an experienced outdoorsman, has planned the weekend; the narrator, Ed Gentry, is a graphic artist who has come along because Lewis asked him to. The river turns out to be indifferent to their preparations.
Rating coming soonNell and Eva live with their father in a house deep in a Northern California forest, more than thirty miles from the nearest town. When the electricity fails and stays off, and the shops run out of fuel and food, the family discovers that nobody is coming to put things right. The sisters have to work out how to live in a place that is suddenly all they have.
Rating coming soonUnder a fallen-down house in the bayou country where Texas meets Louisiana, a hound dog named Ranger is kept chained by a man who has no use for him. A cat who has lost her kittens comes to live in the space beneath the floorboards, and against every instinct Ranger lets her stay. Their safety depends on staying hidden, and on a very old snake called Grandmother Moccasin.
Rating coming soonA young Labrador retriever, an old bull terrier and a Siamese cat are left with a friend in the Ontario countryside while their family travels. When circumstances separate the animals from the person looking after them, the three set out together to find their way home, a journey of some three hundred miles through lakes, rivers, forest and widely scattered farms.
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