Best Adventure Books

Alfred Lansing's classic account of Ernest Shackleton's doomed 1914 Antarctic expedition. When his ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice, Shackleton led his twenty-eight men through nearly two years of almost unimaginable hardship — and brought every one of them home alive.

An English navigator is shipwrecked in feudal Japan in 1600 and drawn into the deadly rivalry between samurai lords competing for supreme power. One of the great historical novels of the twentieth century.

Krakauer's firsthand account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers died during a single storm. One of the greatest adventure narratives ever written.

Pi Patel, the son of an Indian zookeeper, survives a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean and spends 227 days in a lifeboat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, in a story about survival, faith, and the nature of truth itself.

An escaped Australian convict arrives in Bombay with a false passport, becomes a slum doctor, makes friends and enemies among the city's criminals, and discovers a city that unmakes and remakes him completely.

A young British backpacker follows a hand-drawn map to a secret beach in Thailand, joining an isolated community of travellers who believe they have found paradise — before the illusions begin to crack.

The Shade of Essen Tasch has fallen, and a darkness worse than the black stone threatens all three Londons. Kell, Lila, Rhy, and Holland must confront an enemy powerful enough to consume worlds — and the cost of stopping it may be more than any of them can pay.

In the city of Camorr — a fantasy Venice — a gang of elite con artists and thieves called the Gentlemen Bastards pull off elaborate heists while a supernatural criminal element threatens everything.

Kvothe — innkeeper, legend, the most infamous man alive — agrees to tell his life story to a Chronicler over three days. Day One: his childhood with a troupe of travelling performers, his time as a street orphan in Tarbean, and his legendary entry to the University where magic is studied.

Beryl Markham's memoir of growing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, training horses, becoming the first person to fly solo non-stop from England to North America west to east, and living a life that defied every category available to women of her era.

A rare magician who can travel between parallel Londons teams up with a street thief to prevent a dark power from destroying all the worlds.

Charles Portis's beloved Western. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge her murdered father, hiring the drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt the killer into Indian Territory — a tale told in Mattie's unforgettable, flinty voice.

Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp in India during World War II and, after a twenty-one-month crossing of the Himalayas, reaches Lhasa — where he becomes a tutor and friend to the young Dalai Lama as the Chinese invasion closes in.

A desk-bound travel editor retraces Hiram Bingham's 1911 journey to Machu Picchu through the Peruvian Andes, interweaving his own misadventures with the controversial history of the 'discovery' that wasn't.

A convicted murderer has escaped Azkaban prison and is believed to be hunting Harry Potter, forcing Harry to confront the true story of his parents' betrayal and death. The mystery that unravels is more complicated, more painful, and more morally instructive than any straightforward threat.

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, unadventurous hobbit, is swept away by the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves on a quest to reclaim a mountain kingdom from the dragon Smaug. The predecessor to The Lord of the Rings — shorter, lighter in tone, and the perfect entry point to Middle-earth.

D'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony, nearly duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and promptly makes them all friends. Together the four Musketeers serve King Louis XIII while foiling the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the mysterious Milady de Winter. Dumas's greatest adventure novel is relentless entertainment — swashbuckling, witty, morally simple, and structurally impeccable.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione abandon Hogwarts to hunt Voldemort's Horcruxes, confronting betrayal, sacrifice, and the revelation that Harry himself is the final Horcrux. The series concludes with the Battle of Hogwarts and a resurrection that draws on the oldest mythological traditions.

Harry is mysteriously entered into the dangerous Triwizard Tournament while Voldemort's followers grow bolder, culminating in the Dark Lord's terrifying return to full power. The death of a fellow student in the graveyard permanently changes what the Harry Potter series is.

As Voldemort's war spreads beyond Hogwarts, Dumbledore guides Harry through Tom Riddle's past to find the key to destroying him, while a mysterious annotated textbook raises questions about the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. The year ends with Dumbledore's death and the series' darkest turning point yet.

Kaz Brekker and the Dregs execute an increasingly complex series of heists and cons across Ketterdam to reclaim what was stolen from them and destroy those who betrayed them.