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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonA consortium of Japanese shipping magnates asks Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon for help, because their fortunes are being threatened by pirates working the waters of Southeast Asia. Attacks of that kind normally fall on small ships and foreign yachts, but now giant commercial freighters are disappearing. What Cabrillo finds behind the piracy is worse than robbery.
Rating coming soonMitchell's Inn is a lodge deep in the woods of the Catskills with spacious old rooms, wood-burning fireplaces and a well-stocked wine cellar, and a winter weekend there is meant to be a quiet, even romantic, escape. Then a blizzard takes out the electricity and all contact with the outside world. One guest dies in what looks like an accident, and a second death follows.
Rating coming soonThe pirate Pagan is despised by the ton, whose riches he plunders, and loved by the poor, whose plight his gifts relieve, and the Marquess of Cainewood has sworn to hunt him down in revenge for the death of his brother. Then a woman with red hair and green eyes arrives at his door, begging for protection from the men who want her dead.
Rating coming soonPepper Prescott was the middle child of siblings who were separated into foster homes around the country after their parents disappeared, and she has grown up independent and rebellious. Then she witnesses a shooting and goes on the run, and the only place she can think of is the remote mountain ranch where she once felt at home. Her old lover lives there now.
Rating coming soonVine is Cherokee, born and raised in the early 1900s, and she gives up her family and their homeland to settle with a young white man and his people in the mountains. Her mother had predicted that the move would not go smoothly. It goes worse than that: the townspeople treat Vine as an outsider, and her husband's brother becomes strangely fixated on her.
Rating coming soonRose Woodbine is the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter, and she is taken to the court of Charles II, where she is married against her wishes to Lord Pierce Deforte. What she does not know is what he has become in the years since: banished from England, he lives as a pirate, hunting down the people who betrayed him, and she is among the names on his list.
Rating coming soonHal and the Herons have returned home to Skandia after defeating the pirate captain Zavac and recovering the Andomal, and with their honour restored they take on a new mission: tracking down an old rival, Tursgud, who has grown from a bully into a pirate and a slave trader. When Tursgud seizes villagers from Araluen to sell, the crew sails after him.
Rating coming soonDr Emory Charbonneau is a paediatrician and a marathon runner, and she disappears on a mountain road in North Carolina. By the time her husband reports her missing, still annoyed by the argument the two of them have just had, fog and ice have closed the search down. Emory, meanwhile, is the captive of a man who will not tell her his name.
Rating coming soonHal and the Herons are a group of outsiders, and they have just beaten the strongest and most skilled young warriors in Skandia to win the Brotherband competition. Their celebration ends abruptly when the Andomal, the object the Skandians hold most sacred, is stolen, and the Herons are blamed for it. To redeem themselves they have to find the thief and bring it back.
Rating coming soonIn the space of a moment everyone over the age of fourteen disappears from a small town: no adults, no teachers, no police and no parents. The telephones, the internet and the television go with them, which means there is no way to call for help. What is left is young people who are hungry, frightened, and beginning to change.
Rating coming soonAn ancient artifact with catastrophic radioactive power is unearthed in the remote wastes of Greenland, and the find puts the rest of the world at risk. Two militant factions are prepared to slaughter for it, and Juan Cabrillo and his network of spies, known as the Corporation, have to keep them from getting it and stop the outbreak of a world war.
Rating coming soonThe Luthers are sharecroppers living in the mountains of North Carolina, and the father, Roy, is a sick man with four children who are all too young to look after themselves. He asks his second-eldest daughter, Mary Call, to take over his place when he dies, and to tell nobody when it happens, because if the authorities find out the children will be taken from each other.
Rating coming soonIn July 1845 Henry David Thoreau built a small cabin beside Walden Pond, on land near Concord, Massachusetts that belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. Walden is his account of that stay, written up from the journals he kept while he was there, and it mixes close observation of the pond and the woods with an argument about how little a person needs.
Rating coming soonSkeletons on the Zahara is Dean King's account of the loss of an American merchant brig on the coast of North Africa and of what became of the men on board, who were captured by tribesmen and forced into slavery. King builds the story from two journals written by survivors, checking one account against the other, and he travelled the same desert himself to see the ground they crossed nearly two centuries earlier.
Rating coming soonThe Electric State is an illustrated novel by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, published in 2018. In Swedish it is called Passagen, and the English edition came from Skybound Books. The story is told in short passages attached to large paintings of landscape, machinery and people travelling through them, and it follows a teenage orphan and a robot as they cross a ruined America looking for the brother she lost.
Rating coming soonThe Nigger of the Narcissus is a novella by Joseph Conrad about a voyage from Bombay to London aboard the merchant ship Narcissus, and about a West Indian sailor on board who is dying of tuberculosis. The American edition of 1897 came out under a different title, and the book carries a subtitle describing it as a tale of the forecastle.
Rating coming soonThe Climb is Anatoli Boukreev's account of the 1996 disaster on Everest, in which eight climbers died, written with the journalist G. Weston DeWalt. It is also a reply to criticism of Boukreev's own conduct during the climb, and it was published in the same year as Jon Krakauer's account of the same events.
Rating coming soonFreckle Juice is a short chapter book for young children by Judy Blume, illustrated by Sonia O. Lisker and published in 1971. Its hero is a second-grade boy who longs for freckles, and the story turns on what a classmate charges him for a recipe that is supposed to produce them, and on what happens once he drinks it.
Rating coming soonGwyn Hyman Rubio's first novel takes the form of a grown woman's memories of her childhood in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where she grew up in her grandparents' house and began to be taken over by movements she could not control. It appeared in 1998 and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2001.
Rating coming soonKobane Calling is a comic report by the Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare about a journey he made to the Kurdish region of northern Syria. Parts of it were published in 2015 in the Italian weekly Internazionale, and the book appeared the following year, with an English edition calling itself Greetings from Northern Syria.
Rating coming soonCharley Skedaddle is a children's historical novel by Patricia Beatty, first published in 1987 and based on records from the American Civil War. Its hero is a twelve-year-old New Yorker who runs errands for a street gang, runs away to join the army after his brother is killed, and then keeps running after he shoots a man.
Rating coming soonCynthia Rylant's When I Was Young in the Mountains, published in 1982 with pictures by Diane Goode, remembers a childhood in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. It was based on the years Rylant herself spent there with her grandparents, and it is told in the voice of a child looking back rather than in the middle of things.
Rating coming soonFrances O'Roark Dowell's Dovey Coe, published in 2000, is set in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1920s. It is narrated by a twelve-year-old girl who wants to set the record straight about a death in her family, and it won the Edgar Award in 2001 for the best children's mystery of that year.
Rating coming soonFire in the Night is Stephen McGinty's account of the Piper Alpha disaster, published in 2008. The platform stood 110 miles north-east of Aberdeen and was, for a time, the largest single oil producer in the world; on 6 July 1988 it caught fire with 226 men aboard, and sixty-one of them came home.
Rating coming soonBushcraft 101 is a guide to wilderness skills by the survivalist Dave Canterbury, published in 2014. It is arranged around the five things he calls the Cs of survivability, and it sets out the kit and the techniques he thinks a person needs to travel and camp comfortably in backcountry, for readers who want to spend longer out there rather than specialists.
Rating coming soonBig Cherry Holler is a novel by Adriana Trigiani, published in 2001, and it continues the story begun in Big Stone Gap. Eight years into her marriage, Ave Maria Mulligan finds her life at a crossroads, and the town she lives in has no shortage of advice to offer her about it.
Rating coming soonRoughing It is Mark Twain's account of his years in the American West, published in 1872. It covers the overland journey from Missouri to Nevada, an unsuccessful attempt at prospecting, and the newspaper work in Virginia City and San Francisco that turned him into a national figure, and it is one of the books that made his name as a humorist.
Rating coming soonTrek of the Mountain Man is a western by William W. Johnstone, published in 2002. A bounty hunter who still believes there is money in an old warrant takes the wrong person when he cannot find Smoke Jensen, and Jensen goes up into the Rocky Mountains after him. Most of the book is the pursuit itself, across country that both the hunter and the hunted know.
Rating coming soonThe Maid's Version is a novel by Daniel Woodrell, published in 2013. It is set in a small town in Missouri, and it turns on an explosion at a dance hall in 1929 that killed forty-two people, on the question of who was responsible, and on what one woman's pursuit of an answer cost her and the people around her.
Rating coming soonThe SAS Survival Handbook is a guide to surviving in difficult circumstances by John Wiseman, published in 1986 and based on the training of the Special Air Service. It covers everything from accidents and escape procedures to living off the land in polar, tropical and desert climates, and it is illustrated throughout.
Rating coming soonJack Morgan is fourteen, recently orphaned and wanted over a robbery he had nothing to do with, so he is hiding in the starship his uncle left him when another vessel crashes nearby. The only survivor is Draycos, a warrior of a dragon-like species who cannot stay alive for long without a living host to ride on. Draycos needs a body and a pilot, Jack needs someone who can clear his name, and the arrangement they make is meant to be temporary.
Rating coming soonHornblower's promotion to post-captain brings him the Atropos, a sloop of twenty-two guns and barely enough work to justify a captain at all. Before he can sail, he is handed one of the strangest assignments in the Royal Navy, which is arranging the funeral of Lord Nelson, whose death at Trafalgar has left the country in mourning. Then come the pearl divers, the salvage master with a temper, and a wreck full of British army pay.
Rating coming soonIn the spring of 1803, with the Peace of Amiens collapsing, Horatio Hornblower is newly promoted to commander and given a small sloop along with a task that suits it: to watch the French fleet at Brest and report what Napoleon is preparing. He has just married a woman he does not love, and the mission becomes complicated almost at once, because the war restarts while he is close inshore and nobody has thought to tell him.
Rating coming soonCrispin and Bear have just won their freedom in the first book of the trilogy, and they set out to find somewhere to live. Bear's old comrades from the Peasants' Revolt find them almost at once, and an arrow leaves him too badly hurt to travel. A healer living in the woods takes them in, along with a girl called Troth, and when the healer is killed, Bear finds himself responsible for two children instead of one.
Rating coming soonAnwuli Okwudili calls herself AO, for Autobionic Organism, and she has spent her life being told that her body is wrong: born with limbs that needed rebuilding, and rebuilt again with cybernetic prosthetics after a car accident. She works as a mechanic in Abuja, in a Nigeria where everything is streamed and a permanent sandstorm is eating the north. Then a trip to a market goes catastrophically wrong, and AO is a fugitive running north with a herdsman who is also wanted for murder.
Rating coming soonAlanna of Trebond is still pretending to be a boy, and she has become squire to the heir of the realm, which means her secret has grown rather than shrunk. Between her training and the first war with neighbouring Tusaine, she is learning how to use the magic she has mostly kept hidden, and how to live with the fact that the two men closest to her are both in love with a person she has decided she cannot be.
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