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 6 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Surprise comes home from the far side of the world with prisoners aboard and a captain who has never met his grown son. Ashore in England, Jack Aubrey is drawn into a different kind of battle, fought on dry land and in the market, where his name and his fortune are no longer safe from the people who wish him harm.
Rating coming soonThe chase of the Franklin has taken the Surprise across the Pacific to the coast of Peru, where an undercover mission that has waited for years is finally within reach. Stephen Maturin has to cross the Andes to rejoin his ship, while Jack Aubrey, out on the ocean, finds the weather and the sea itself turning against him.
Rating coming soonA mail packet running for England is chased across the Atlantic for the papers in Stephen Maturin's hands, and for the woman travelling with him. Safely ashore, Jack Aubrey is given a small ship and a mission on the Danish coast, and the two friends find that the war has another kind of danger waiting for them.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey, now a commodore with a squadron under him, is sent to the coast of West Africa to act against the trade in slaves, and afterwards to a station where Napoleon's navy is to be found. On land, meanwhile, Stephen Maturin meets a daughter he has never seen and finds that an old enemy intends to reach him through her.
Rating coming soonNews that England may be encouraging the Spanish colonies to break away changes the Surprise's orders, and Jack Aubrey's commission is restored to him along with a ship to carry an envoy to the Malay states. Stephen Maturin goes along for the treaty, the natural history, and the chance to work on a problem of his own.
Rating coming soonWaiting in Malta while the Surprise is repaired, Stephen Maturin finds that the island is also home to a network of French agents, and that one of them is using a woman's troubles to buy her services. A new admiral takes command of the station and sends Jack Aubrey out on a series of errands, some of which are not what they seem.
Rating coming soonBound home from the far side of the world to take up a new command, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have their passage interrupted by a fire aboard ship, and they find themselves caught up in a war that began while they were away. Much of what follows takes place in Boston, and the book turns two real battles of 1812 into fiction.
Rating coming soonOn a small island in the Scilly Isles in 1915, a boy who has slipped away from school to go fishing hears a sound coming from an island nobody lives on. What he finds there is a girl who cannot or will not say who she is, and the question of where she came from slowly divides the people of his community.
Rating coming soonIn 1665 a privateer named Charles Hunter is hired by the governor of Jamaica to take a Spanish galleon and the treasure she carries, at a time when the English colony at Port Royal is holding on against the power of Spain. What he plans is a raid on a Spanish fortress, and he has to assemble the men to carry it out.
Rating coming soonIn the South American republic of Costaguana, a long history of tyranny and revolution has been interrupted by a spell of order, and an English-born mine owner is determined to keep his silver concession working. When the country rises again, the question becomes what happens to the silver, and who will be trusted to carry it.
Rating coming soonA newly arrived lieutenant joins HMS Renown and finds that her captain's suspicions of his officers have grown into something close to madness. The story is told by William Bush, one of those officers, which leaves the reader to work out for themselves what happened in the hold on the night the captain fell.
Rating coming soonRewarded for a famous action with the command of a two-decker he does not want, Horatio Hornblower takes HMS Sutherland to sea under an admiral who is married to the woman he loves. His orders are to escort a convoy of East Indiamen along the Spanish coast, in a ship short of men and in waters full of French privateers.
Rating coming soonThe drought has been going on long enough that life is a list of things people are not allowed to do with water, and then the taps stop running for good. In a California suburb, Alyssa's street turns into something close to a war zone as neighbours and families fight each other for a supply that cannot cover them all.
Rating coming soonA family is camping on a remote island when a black bear attacks their campsite in the night, leaving the two children alone. Five-year-old Anna gets her little brother into the family's canoe and paddles away, and the two of them are left to find food and shelter at the edge of the woods, with nothing in Anna's world seeming safe any more.
Rating coming soonThree things happen that have nothing to do with one another: an Antarctic whaler finds an old wreck with a frozen crew and something valuable aboard, anthropologists are buried under a mountain by a deliberate explosion, and a ship that should have gone down fifty-six years ago reappears and nearly sinks a government research vessel.
Rating coming soonJacky Faber is on her way home to marry the man she has loved for years when British Naval Intelligence takes her off the ship and hands her another assignment. She is to lead an expedition after a Spanish treasure ship that went down with millions in gold, and she is promised a share of it and a pardon for her past.
Rating coming soonA newly appointed professor of Semitic languages is summoned to the Israeli embassy and shown a parchment that appears to describe the hiding of the Menorah, the temple candelabrum taken out of Jerusalem before the Romans destroyed it. The Jordanians have a better copy of the same document, and both of them point to a third.
Rating coming soonTwo boys spend a summer on the River Say in a canoe called the Minnow, looking for treasure that an ancestor of one of them hid along the bank in the years when England was expecting the Spanish Armada. The only clue they have is a short poem, and they have the whole holiday to work out what it means.
Rating coming soonOn board a warship in the last years of the eighteenth century, a young sailor known to the whole crew as the handsome sailor is pressed into service and makes friends of almost everyone aboard. The one man who cannot bear him is the master-at-arms, and what follows destroys them both. The ship is a world of its own, and the trouble that comes to it comes from inside.
Rating coming soonCaptain MacWhirr takes the steamer Nan-Shan out of port with a cargo and a crew who do not much like him, and runs her straight into a tropical cyclone. He is a dull man with no imagination, his first mate has already advised him to change course, and MacWhirr sees no reason to alter any of his arrangements.
Rating coming soonA brilliant Egyptologist translating a set of hieroglyphics comes across a message that describes the tomb of an unnamed pharaoh, one that has never been found. He cannot mount an expedition himself without alerting the Egyptian authorities, so he tells a freelance writer, and between them they assemble a crew. The odds are not in their favour.
Rating coming soonMelis Nemid runs a dive resort in the Caribbean and knows how dangerous the water can be, but she has never wanted anything to do with the treasure that is supposed to lie under it. Two men she has been close to have already been lost to the hunt, and now somebody is trying to pull her into it.
Rating coming soonA marine archaeologist finds the keys to an ancient puzzle and takes a team of scientists and former soldiers out to look for what he believes could be the greatest archaeological discovery there has ever been. Somebody else is watching the expedition and waiting to strike, and neither party knows what is waiting in the water. It is a race against time as much as a search.
Rating coming soonWhen a sailing ship breaks up on the rocks off Cape Flattery, the authorities say there were no survivors, and the fourteen-year-old son of the lighthouse keeper refuses to believe them. Footprints on an empty beach and a wild figure glimpsed in the sea caves convince him that somebody is hiding out there. He is not supposed to go near the caves, and he goes anyway.
Rating coming soonWill has finished his apprenticeship and is now a Ranger with a fief of his own, which turns out to be less peaceful than it looked. When the Skandians appear he has to deal with them, and then he is sent on a secret mission with his friend Alyss, into a country frightened of sorcery. Nobody there is sure who can be trusted.
Rating coming soonThe Jinx Inc. treasure-hunting company has a new job, which is to find the cave pearls that are supposed to exist in the lowest chamber of an ancient cave. Its leader, an ex-Navy SEAL named Caleb Peach, first has to persuade an archaeologist to come along, and she is not easy to pin down. The pearls are not the only thing hidden down there.
Rating coming soonHaven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, comes to Positano to look at the shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast, and she is also privately searching for a trove of gemstones her father saw on his last dive. Then maelstroms and misfortunes begin to trouble the town. The water off that coast has swallowed a great deal, and it is still taking things.
Rating coming soonThey came west by river and by wagon train, across the distances of the Great Plains and through the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada, and the novel follows a set of them: men like Linus Rawlings and women like Lilith Prescott, who fled her family and fell for a gambling man.
Rating coming soonJames Adams is fourteen and works for a secret organisation that uses children as agents, because nobody suspects a child of being a spy. His next assignment is to get inside an animal liberation group that has moved from protest to terrorism. The organisation he works for exists because adults are watched and children are not.
Rating coming soonMatt Cruse is fourteen and works as a cabin boy on a passenger airship that crosses the ocean held up by a gas called hydrium. One night on lookout duty he spots a damaged balloon and saves the man in it, who dies aboard talking about creatures nobody believes in. Nobody believes him at first.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson gets an urgent call from his friend Grover and sets out at once, with his friends and his sword, to find out what has happened. What the demigods find is that a goddess and one of their own have been taken. The army they are up against is not a small one.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has put his whole fortune into a project that he believes will save the planet and everybody on it, human and fairy alike. It is not the sort of thing he usually does, and the people who know him are suspicious. What has happened to Artemis is the puzzle the book sets up.
Rating coming soonThree months after Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the other boys have settled on their island and the pirates marooned with them have built a fort. Then a scarred captain arrives in search of what he believes is hidden there, bringing with him an entity of shadow that can take hold of a person's mind. Far away, Peter's friend Molly is on her way home.
Rating coming soonMiri has spent her whole life on Mount Eskel, in the quarry village where her family cuts the stone that the lowlanders buy from them. When the priests announce that the prince will marry a girl from the mountain, the village girls are sent to an academy the lowlanders have set up to make them fit to be royal, and the test turns out not to be only about manners.
Rating coming soonDavid is ten years old, plays the violin and does not know his own surname. He has grown up in the mountains with his father, and when the man's health fails they come down into the valley. The night his father dies in a barn, David is found playing for him, and the boy who has never lived among other people has to begin.
Rating coming soonChristy Huddleson is nineteen and the daughter of a comfortable family in North Carolina when she hears a mission founder describe a mountain community that has no school. She volunteers to teach there, and in 1912 she arrives in the village of Cutter Gap in Tennessee, where the people she has come to help have their own ways of doing things.
Rating coming soonTy Ty Walden owns a farm in rural Georgia during the Depression and spends his days digging it over for gold, with his sons Buck and Shaw working beside him. The family is poor, the fields are going unplanted, and the acre he has promised to the church keeps moving so that he does not have to stop digging there.
Rating coming soonIn nineteenth-century London five orphaned boys are put aboard the decrepit ship Never Land and sent away. One of them, Peter, finds a locked trunk on board and the girl guarding it, Molly Aster, and learns that the chest holds a dust of extraordinary power that other people are hunting. A pirate called Black Stache is already after a ship carrying a decoy of it.
Rating coming soonRagged Island, six miles off the coast of Maine, has a pit in it that has killed everyone who has ever gone down, and the eighteenth-century pirate Red Ned Ockham is supposed to have buried close to two billion dollars of treasure at the bottom of it. A team arrives with modern equipment to try the pit again, and one of them has been on the island before.
Rating coming soonJamie Grimm is a middle-school boy in a wheelchair, living with his aunt's family after the car crash that killed his parents and his sister and left him paralysed. He wants to be treated like any other kid, and he is also a natural comedian. When he enters a local comedy contest, it takes him further than he expected it to.
Rating coming soonMarcel Mabout is ten years old and has been sent up to the summer pasture in the French mountains with the family's three cows, trusted with the family fortune for the very first time. He has also been given the family rule, which the whole village lives by: mind your own business.
Rating coming soonBelle Teal Harper is starting fifth grade, and she lives with her mother Adele and her grandmother Belle Teal Rhodes in a town where not everybody is kind. Her year includes a new classmate who is black, the friendship she tries to build for her, and a good deal that is harder than a fifth-grader should have to deal with.
Rating coming soonAlthea Vestrit is serving aboard another liveship while her family's own ship has fallen into the hands of a pirate who intends to make himself king of the Pirate Isles, and her brother Wintrow is aboard it with him. In Bingtown the merchants are being squeezed by the Satrap's taxes and his Chalcedean soldiers, and more of the Old Traders are beginning to think about rebellion.
Rating coming soonDevlin O'Neill is a captain in the British Royal Navy with one thing on his mind: destroying the man who murdered his father. He has almost ruined the Earl of Eastleigh financially and is waiting to strike the final blow when the earl's niece arrives from America. Virginia Hughes has sailed to England alone to borrow money from her uncle, and gets kidnapped for her trouble.
Rating coming soonWhen the United States secretary of state's plane goes down on her way to a summit meeting in Libya, the CIA does not trust the Libyans to look for her and hires Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon instead. The aircraft is found, but the secretary of state has vanished, and Libya's foreign minister has plans for the conference that Cabrillo cannot allow.
Rating coming soonSara Winchester was a child bride, and she has grown up expecting the day her husband, Nathan, Marquess of St. James, will come back and claim her heart. She is innocent enough to dismiss the ancient feud between his family and hers, and she has no idea who he has been in the meantime: the pirate known as Pagan.
Rating coming soonThe six Zeroes have taken on bank robbers, drug dealers and mobsters with their abilities, and now they are trying to keep out of sight while they quietly get their new illegal nightclub off the ground. The quiet does not last: two strangers arrive in town with a very different kind of crowd-based chaos behind them, and something more dangerous and sinister still follows the strangers.
Rating coming soonAbigail Lovett manages The Passage Inn, a small resort in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter's Pass, which is known for hiking and rafting and for a history of unsolved disappearances. When a journalist staying at the inn to write about that history disappears himself, the town comes under scrutiny again and his brother arrives looking for answers.
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