Best Adventure Books

Harry Potter's second year at Hogwarts is shadowed by a mysterious voice in the walls and a series of petrifications tied to the legend of a Chamber of Secrets. When the Heir of Slytherin opens the Chamber again, Harry must confront a darkness rooted in the wizarding world's oldest prejudices.

The true story of the 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Patagonia, the murderous castaways who survived, and the competing accounts of what happened that constituted a kind of 18th-century trial.

Harry's fifth year is defined by institutional persecution, Voldemort's growing power, and the devastating loss of the person who most represented his connection to his parents. The Ministry of Magic has declared war on the truth, and Dolores Umbridge has come to Hogwarts to enforce it.

Nathaniel Philbrick's National Book Award–winning history of the whaleship Essex, sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1820 — the true event that inspired Moby-Dick. The survivors' ordeal in open boats, including the desperate choices they faced, makes for a gripping and harrowing tale of the sea.

In a future dystopia, teenager Wade Watts escapes reality in the OASIS virtual reality world and joins a global competition to find a hidden treasure that will determine control of the internet.

The story of Christopher McCandless, a young man from a privileged background who walked into the Alaskan wilderness alone in 1992 — and was found dead in an abandoned bus four months later.

Ex-military cop Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit in a small Georgia town and uncovers a massive counterfeiting conspiracy that cost his brother his life.

The October 1991 Halloween storm — a combination of three separate weather systems that produced what meteorologists called a perfect storm — and the swordfishing boat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose six-man crew did not survive it. A reconstruction of the last voyage and the meteorological event that ended it.

After the collapse of her marriage and her mother's death, Cheryl Strayed impulsively hiked 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone — unprepared, grieving, and ultimately transformed.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon races through Rome to stop the Illuminati from destroying Vatican City with an antimatter bomb as a new Pope is being elected.

When Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called Inkheart, characters tumble out of the story into the real world — and something from our world disappears into the book in exchange.

In a fractured future Republic of America, June — the regime's most gifted military prodigy — is tasked with hunting down Day, a wanted fugitive and folk hero from the slums, and the dual first-person structure places them on a collision course before forcing both to question everything they believed about the world they serve.

A Harvard symbologist and a French cryptologist race through Paris and London decoding clues that lead to a secret that could shake the foundations of Christianity.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon wakes in a Florence hospital with no memory of the past few days and must decode a mystery rooted in Dante's Inferno before a bioterrorist threat kills millions.

Edmond Dantès is wrongly imprisoned, escapes after fourteen years, acquires a vast fortune, and returns to Paris as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to execute a perfectly planned revenge on those who destroyed his life. Dumas's epic is the greatest revenge story ever told — intricate, theatrical, and utterly compelling.

Jim Hawkins, a young inn-keeper's son, sets sail with squire and doctor to find buried pirate treasure — and finds the charismatic, dangerous Long John Silver along the way. Stevenson's adventure novel invented the pirate genre and remains the definitive treasure-hunt story.

Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim raft down the Mississippi River through the antebellum American South — a story about freedom whose treatment of race remains the subject of serious literary debate.

The unflappable English gentleman Phileas Fogg bets his fortune at the Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days — and immediately sets off with his new valet Passepartout, pursued by a detective who believes Fogg is a bank robber. Verne's most beloved novel is propulsive, funny, and ingeniously plotted: an argument that the world is finite, knowable, and worth racing across.

Buck, a large mixed-breed dog living comfortably on a California estate, is stolen and sold into the brutal sled-dog trade of the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. Through successive owners, cold, hunger, and violence, he is stripped of domestication and hears ever more clearly the ancient call of the wild. London's short novel is a survival story, a philosophical meditation, and a study in what instinct and adaptation actually mean.

Mowgli, a human child, is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, mentored by the bear Baloo and the panther Bagheera, and threatened by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's collection of linked stories — plus separate tales about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose, a white seal, and the elephants' dance — is simultaneously a thrilling adventure story, a meditation on belonging, and one of the founding documents of modern children's literature.

Cylinders from Mars crash into the English countryside and open to reveal tentacled Martians who begin methodically annihilating human civilization with heat-rays and tripod war machines. Wells's 1898 novel invented the alien invasion genre and used it to turn the logic of British imperial power inside out, placing England in the position of the colonised.

Twenty years have passed since Culloden. Jamie Fraser survived. Claire travels back through the stones to find him — and does, in Edinburgh in 1766. Their reunion after two decades apart is the emotional centrepiece of the entire Outlander series, before the narrative expands into a dangerous voyage to the Caribbean and Jamaica.

Jamie and Claire make their new home in the American colonies, building Fraser's Ridge in the North Carolina backcountry as the rumblings of revolution grow around them. Meanwhile, their daughter Brianna in the twentieth century discovers a letter predicting her parents' fate — and must decide whether to use the stones to change it.

Professor Otto Lidenbrock finds a runic message revealing a route to the centre of the earth through an Icelandic volcano. He drags his reluctant nephew Axel and a taciturn Icelandic guide into the depths — through vast underground seas, prehistoric forests, and geological wonders — in Verne's most rapturously imaginative novel.