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 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonMafatu is the son of the chief of Hikueru, an island whose people judge a man by his courage on the water. He has been afraid of the sea since he watched his mother drown, and the other boys have never let him forget it. At fifteen he takes a canoe and sails out alone to prove that he is not the coward they call him.
Rating coming soonIt is 1974, and Leni Allbright's father comes home from the Vietnam War and decides to move his family to Alaska to live off the land. The Allbrights arrive in a small community before winter with almost nothing and no experience of the country. As the dark closes in, Leni watches her parents' marriage come apart, and she has to grow up quickly.
Rating coming soonThree months after every adult in the town disappeared and a barrier sealed the children inside, the food has run out and nobody has a plan. Some of the younger survivors are developing powers that set them apart from the rest, and the ordinary children are starting to be afraid of them. In the hills above the town, something old has begun calling to a handful of teenagers.
Rating coming soonDuring the American Revolution, the strip of New York country between the British and Continental lines is nobody's ground, and both armies move through it at night. At a house called The Locusts, a Loyalist family shelters a stranger from a storm, and a peddler named Harvey Birch arrives behind him. Nobody in the house can agree on whether the peddler is a patriot, a thief or a British agent, and the fighting that follows is as much about who deserves to be trusted as it is about which army wins.
Rating coming soonThe Stone family live on the Moon, where the twins Castor and Pollux have decided that life is too dull. They buy a used spaceship to go into business for themselves, and their father, mother and grandmother Hazel come along for the ride. The tour takes them from Mars to the asteroid belt and further out, with a cargo of bicycles, a doctor's house calls and one Martian pet that nobody thought through.
Rating coming soonPhillip Enright survived being blinded and shipwrecked on a small island in the Caribbean with an old sailor called Timothy, and he has been rescued. Now there is an operation that might give him back his sight. Between the chapters about what Phillip does with the rest of his life are the chapters about Timothy's, beginning with his childhood on St. Thomas and ending with how he came to be on that island.
Rating coming soonDane Thorson finishes trade school and is assigned as apprentice cargo master on the Solar Queen, a free trader that hauls cargo between the planets and takes whatever contracts it can find. At the end of his first flight the captain gets the chance to bid on a newly opened world, and the crew puts everything they have into winning the contract for a planet called Limbo. The information that comes with the contract is not encouraging.
Rating coming soonA hurricane levels the estate of the Bas-Thornton family in Jamaica, and the parents decide that their children should be sent back to England for safety. On the way, the ship is taken by pirates, and the children end up aboard the pirate vessel instead. The captain, Jonsen, is a well-meaning man who has no idea what to do with his new passengers.
Rating coming soonThe haunted season has come to the Antler Wood, and no fox kit is safe in it. Mia and Uly, two foxes from different dens, are separated from their litters and have to find a den to call home, which means crossing field and forest past a zombie that hungers for their flesh, a witch who wants their skins and a ghost that hunts them through the snow.
Rating coming soonLanesha lives in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans with Mama Ya-Ya, the midwife who took her in at birth, and she has the second sight that Mama Ya-Ya recognises as the same gift she has herself. Mama Ya-Ya knows a hurricane is approaching before the radio and television say anything, and she is too old and has no car.
Rating coming soonSix children are thrown together against their will on a small boat that is to make a month-long journey across the Pacific Ocean. They were sent for different reasons by different families, and none of them chose the trip. What begins as a voyage becomes something else when the boat is wrecked and they are left to survive.
Rating coming soonAt the edge of a strange lake that seems to stretch on forever, Lucky and his Pack are about to discover even more dangers than the ones they have already survived. With the Fierce Dogs on their trail and the Storm of Dogs looming on the horizon, every dog will have to fight for survival or be swept away.
Rating coming soonFor the first time in her memory, Storm has a place in a Pack, and the world that the Big Growl devastated is at peace. The peace does not hold: tensions are rising among the dogs of the Wild Pack, and the greatest danger they face may be coming from inside the group rather than from outside it.
Rating coming soonJerome Horwitz Elementary School is holding its Invention Convention, and George Beard and Harold Hutchins have been sent to study hall by their principal, Mr Krupp, after gluing everyone to their seats the previous year. Their attempt to sabotage the convention runs into Melvin Sneedly, who has built a photocopier that can turn a picture into a real being.
Rating coming soonThis is an extra instalment of the Keeper of the Lost Cities series, picking up from the cliffhanger that closed Legacy, with chapters alternating between Sophie's perspective and Keefe's. In the series numbering it sits between the eighth and ninth novels. It also includes a complete series guide with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and other bonus material for readers already following the series.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner is terrified. He is out of hiding for the first time in his life, and any minute one of his new classmates could discover his secret: he is a third child passing as the recently deceased Lee Grant. In a society where families may not have more than two children, being a third child means death.
Rating coming soonSeventy-year-old John Sidney Howard is on a fishing holiday in France when the German army overruns the country. Asked by an English couple at his hotel to take their two children home to safety, he agrees, and every delay on the road adds another child to his charge until he is leading six of them through occupied France towards the sea, with the Nazis close behind.
Rating coming soonAlec Ramsay is travelling home by ship when a black stallion is loaded aboard. A wreck in a storm leaves the boy and the horse the only survivors, and they wash up on a deserted island where each of them has to trust the other to stay alive until a passing ship takes them off. Back in America the stallion is still wild.
Rating coming soonJournalist John Easley goes north to Alaska to investigate the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands, a story the American government has censored, leaving his wife Helen behind. His plane is shot down over Attu and he survives only to face the wind, the cold and starvation while evading the Japanese, as Helen at home has to work out who she is without him.
Rating coming soonA boy has fled his home in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence and is walking across an infinite, arid plain to escape the people pursuing him. One night he meets an old goatherd who lives simply and decently, and their paths become entwined as the boy decides whether to choose hope or the cycle of violence he has grown up in.
Rating coming soonAvery Delacorte is a sophomore on her university's nationally ranked swim team when the flight she takes home for Thanksgiving makes a ditch landing in a mountain lake in the Colorado Rockies. One of five survivors, she is stranded in sub-zero temperatures with three small boys and her teammate Colin Shea, and the two of them have to rely on each other to stay alive.
Rating coming soonSix children are sent on a month-long voyage across the Pacific for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to be there. Their differences stop mattering when a storm wrecks the boat and leaves them stranded in the middle of the ocean with no food, no water and almost no hope of being found.
Rating coming soonIn 1996 Dirk Pitt is searching for a treasure on the Nile when he prevents an attempt on the life of a United Nations scientist investigating a disease that is driving thousands of North Africans into madness and death. The suspected cause is a vast pollution that threatens to extinguish life in the world's seas.
Rating coming soonA wealthy American financier disappears while hunting treasure in an antique airship, and the blimp drifts out of Cuban waters towards Florida carrying the bodies of Soviet cosmonauts. Dirk Pitt uncovers a covert group of American industrialists who have put a colony on the moon and will defend it at any cost.
Rating coming soonJaffy Brown is running through the back streets of east London when he comes face to face with a tiger that has escaped from a menagerie. Charles Jamrach takes him out of its jaws and gives him a job. Some years later Jaffy, now sixteen, is sent to the other side of the world on a whaling ship to catch something for the collection.
Rating coming soonJohn Ridd is the son of a respectable farming family on Exmoor, and his father was murdered by the Doones, a clan of outlaws who were once noble and now rule a valley of their own. John grows up intending to be a farmer rather than a revenger, and then he meets Lorna Doone by accident and falls in love with her, which puts him on the wrong side of the clan that killed his father.
Rating coming soonTheodosia Throckmorton is eleven and spends her time in the London museum where her parents work, removing curses from the Egyptian objects that come into the collection. When her mother sends a crate home from Egypt containing a statue with a dangerous curse on it, Theodosia finds herself hunted by two secret societies, one that wants the statue protected and one that wants to use it.
Rating coming soonIn 1872 a refitted United States Navy tug sails for the North Pole in search of a route nobody has found. Off the coast of Greenland the ship is caught in the ice for months, and the expedition splits in two, with half the crew aboard the vessel and the rest stranded on an ice floe that begins to drift.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey is ashore on half pay with no ship when Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders: he is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant and take two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. Two of the captains under him, a pleasure-seeking dilettante and a disciplinarian whose severity nearly drives his crew to mutiny, make the commission harder than the enemy does.
Rating coming soonCaptain Jack Aubrey is given a new mission: to take his ship to the Pacific and protect the British whaling fleet there from an American frigate, which will mean his first voyage around Cape Horn. Dr Stephen Maturin has not yet identified the senior French agent who escaped him, and he does not know that the letter he sends his wife is going by the hand of exactly that man.
Rating coming soonIn January 1794, on the eve of the wars with France, a seventeen-year-old called Horatio Hornblower joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He is seasick, awkward and socially hopeless, and the other midshipmen decide he is a dullard. Then he is sent to board a French merchant ship and take charge of it, and something in him turns out to work properly at sea.
Rating coming soonHumphrey Van Weyden is a literary critic whose ferry collides with another vessel in the fog, and he is picked out of the water by the crew of a sealing ship. The captain who rescues him, Wolf Larsen, is a man of enormous physical strength and no moral restraint whatsoever, and he has no intention of putting his guest ashore.
Rating coming soonJim is a young British seaman with a romantic idea of the life he means to lead, and an early voyage gives him the chance to prove it. It goes the other way: he and the rest of the officers abandon a passenger ship in distress, the ship does not sink, and the crew are publicly condemned for leaving eight hundred people aboard.
Rating coming soonPhillip Enright is eleven and living on the island of Curacao when the war comes close enough for his mother to take him away by ship. The ship is torpedoed, and Phillip wakes on a raft in the middle of the sea with an old West Indian sailor called Timothy, a cat called Stew Cat and a head injury that has left him blind.
Rating coming soonSpensa has wanted to be a pilot since she was a child, and on the ruined world where what is left of humanity has taken shelter, pilots are the only heroes there are. The trouble is her father, who flew before her and who broke formation in the battle that made the survivors what they are, and nobody intends to let his daughter forget it.
Rating coming soonA Yorkshire whaling ship called the Volunteer is bound for the Arctic in the 1850s, in a trade that is being killed off by cheaper fuels. On board are a harpooner named Henry Drax, who is as dangerous as he is capable, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon taken on as the ship's doctor for want of anything better.
Rating coming soonIn the early 1950s an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship in Colombo, bound for England, travelling on his own. At meals he is seated at the cat's table, the one furthest from the captain's, with two other boys and a collection of adults the rest of the passengers have no use for, and over three weeks at sea the three of them find out what is on board.
Rating coming soonNhamo is eleven and lives in a Shona village in Mozambique, in a country in the middle of a war she only half understands. When a cholera epidemic and a proposed marriage to a man she does not want leave her with nothing to stay for, she takes her grandmother's blessing, some gold nuggets and a small boat, and sets out alone.
Rating coming soonAnne Beddingfeld has just been left on her own and is looking for some adventure when a man falls onto the live rail at a London tube station and dies. A doctor who examines the body drops a piece of paper as he leaves, and Anne picks it up. The next day a woman is found strangled, and a fortune in diamonds has gone missing.
Rating coming soonA small group of teenagers is hiding in the bush while an unnamed foreign power occupies their part of Australia. They have already lost two of their number and do not know what has become of either of them, and in this second summer of the war they decide that they have to find out, which means going back into the town they escaped from.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson is thirteen and alone in the Canadian wilderness, living beside an L-shaped lake after the plane he was travelling in went down, and he has taught himself enough to last a summer there. In this telling the emergency transmitter in the wreck is never switched on, no rescue comes, and the season that follows is one he was not prepared for.
Rating coming soonWill Robert is ten years old, grieving for his father, who was killed in Iraq, and on holiday in Indonesia with his mother. He is riding an elephant called Oona along the beach when the animal refuses to go near the water and then bolts inland with him on her back, which is how he comes to be looking down at the sea when the wave arrives.
Rating coming soonCal and Frida have left the wreckage of Los Angeles behind them and live in a shack in the wilderness in northern California, farming and foraging and getting by. Their arrangement works, narrowly, until Frida discovers she is pregnant, and the two of them have to decide whether to raise a child alone in the woods or look for other people.
Rating coming soonBefore the organisation in the other books was formed and before the maze was built, solar flares struck the Earth and killed most of the people living on it. Mark and Trina were in New York when it happened and they survived, and what they find afterwards is a second disaster: a virus that fills the people it infects with murderous rage.
Rating coming soonAwasin is a Cree boy and Jamie is a Canadian orphan living with his uncle, a trapper, and both of them are drawn to the enormous emptiness of the northern country. They set out together to see it, and the journey turns out to be far longer and far more dangerous than either of them had reckoned on.
Rating coming soonWinifred Allen is in need of a holiday. Her job has drained her, her brother has died and a long marriage has ended, so when her three closest friends propose their annual trip, she agrees to a hiking and white-water rafting expedition in the Maine wilderness, despite misgivings she does not voice. It is the most demanding trip the four of them have ever attempted together.
Rating coming soonA Pentagon research programme needs an element so rare that the only known supply went to the bottom of the Atlantic with the Titanic. When satellite data and a captured agent's clues point to the wreck, Dirk Pitt is drawn into a plan to reach the liner where she lies and bring her, and her cargo, back to the surface.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey has been struck off the Navy List, and the frigate Surprise, bought at auction by his friend Stephen Maturin, sails out of an English port as a privateer with a letter of marque. Her crew is a mixed company of old hands, privateers and smugglers, and her captain is looking for a cruise profitable enough to restore him.
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