Best Adventure Books

Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the white whale has driven sailors mad, inspired philosophers, and occupied literary scholars for 170 years — part adventure story, part cetology treatise, part cosmic meditation on obsession, fate, and human insignificance.

The Liveship Traders trilogy reaches its conclusion as the Vestrit family, the serpents migrating north, the sea-serpent wizards, and the full history of the Rain Wilds converge. Hobb resolves every storyline with characteristic emotional force, and the origins of the liveships are among the most devastating and most earned reveals in the entire Realm of the Elderlings.

Tom Sawyer, a spirited and imaginative boy in the Mississippi river town of St Petersburg, whitewashes fences, falls in love with Becky Thatcher, witnesses a murder at the graveyard, runs away to Jackson's Island, testifies against Injun Joe, and finds treasure in a cave. Twain's quintessential American boyhood story is lighter than Huckleberry Finn and entirely unsentimental despite its nostalgic surface.

An unnamed Victorian inventor builds a machine that carries him to the year 802,701, where he discovers humanity has diverged into two degenerate species: the frail, childlike Eloi who live in crumbling palaces, and the subterranean Morlocks who tend the machines below ground. Wells's slim, ferocious novella invented time travel as a literary device and deployed it as a savage critique of Victorian class divisions.

Marine biologist Professor Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land are captured by the enigmatic Captain Nemo and taken aboard the technologically miraculous submarine Nautilus for an involuntary voyage across the world's oceans. Verne's 1870 novel imagined submarine travel decades before it existed and created in Nemo one of fiction's great compelling anti-heroes.

White Fang — three-quarters wolf, one-quarter dog — is born in the Yukon wilderness, tamed and brutalised into a fighting dog, and finally rescued by a kind master who teaches him that love exists. The companion novel to The Call of the Wild tells the reverse story: where Buck moves from civilisation to the wild, White Fang moves from the wild toward civilisation and love.

Monza Murcatto is the Snake of Talins — the most feared mercenary captain in Styria — until she's betrayed and thrown from a high window by the duke she served. She survives. Seven men were in the room. She intends to kill every one of them. A revenge thriller set in the world of the First Law trilogy.

The Vestrit family's liveship — a wizardwood vessel that becomes sentient after absorbing three generations of deaths at the helm — is contested between family members as debt, grief, and ambition pull it in different directions. Hobb's second Realm of the Elderlings trilogy expands the world of the Farseer books outward into the sea-trading culture of Bingtown.

The Vivacia has been taken by the pirate Kennit, Althea and Brashen are fitting out the mad liveship Paragon to pursue her, and in Jamaillia the political situation threatens to destroy the Bingtown Traders' way of life entirely. The middle volume of the trilogy deepens every character and storyline, and Kennit's chapters represent some of Hobb's most complex and demanding writing.

Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, along with their insufferable cousin Eustace Scrubb, are pulled into a painting of a ship and join King Caspian's voyage to the edge of the world.

Two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth, the city of Kingsbridge is swept up in the arrival of the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the ambitions of builders, healers, merchants, and monks. Follett returns to his most beloved setting with a cast of characters as vivid as the original.

A bus crash in a South Dakota blizzard strands Reacher in a small town where a witness to a drug case is under threat, a nearby military installation holds a dangerous secret, and Reacher has 61 hours before everything goes wrong. Child's countdown structure turns each chapter into a timer.

Four months after the events of the first book, Kell is trapped in Red London, confined by King Maxim after the near-catastrophe of the black stone. Lila Bard is somewhere on the seas, pursuing her own ambitions. When the Essen Tasch — a magical tournament held every four years — draws competitors from all three Londons, their paths converge again.

Members of Reacher's old Special Investigations unit are being murdered one by one, and someone has wired $30,000 into Reacher's bank account — the unit's old distress signal. For the first time in the series, Reacher assembles a team to find out who is hunting his people.

On a New York City subway at 2am, Reacher spots a woman exhibiting the eleven behavioural signs of a suicide bomber. What follows spirals into a conspiracy reaching back to Afghanistan and forward into a senator's carefully constructed political future.

Jim, a first mate on a passenger ship, abandons eight hundred Muslim pilgrims during an apparent emergency — and must spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he did. Conrad's novel of cowardice, guilt, and the impossibility of redemption is narrated by Marlow, who reconstructs Jim's story from fragments.

Reacher stops at a town called Mother's Rest with no reason other than curiosity about the name. A journalist searching for a missing colleague pulls him into something far darker — a secret that explains the town's strange, unsettled atmosphere and that proves to be genuinely horrifying.

A sniper kills five random people in a midwestern city. The evidence is overwhelming. The suspect is in custody. He asks for one thing: Jack Reacher. Reacher arrives not to help the man get off, but to make sure justice is done — only to discover that something about the case does not add up.

John Clark — the CIA field operative who has appeared across Clancy's Jack Ryan universe — is given command of Rainbow, a multinational counter-terrorism unit. When a series of hostage situations reveals a larger conspiracy involving bioterrorism and corporate eco-extremism, Rainbow must stop a plot aimed at reducing the human population.

In eleventh-century England, a young orphan named Rob Cole discovers he has an uncanny gift for sensing when people are near death; driven by this gift and a burning desire to understand medicine, he makes an extraordinary journey across the medieval world to study under the greatest physician of the age, Ibn Sina, in Persia.

Jack Reacher is accidentally grabbed off a Chicago street alongside a woman he barely knows — an FBI agent named Holly Johnson. Their kidnappers are a heavily armed militia group with a survivalist compound in Montana and a plan that amounts to mass murder. Reacher has no weapon, no help, and an 800-mile journey between him and the militia's endgame.

Hitchhiking through the Texas heat, Reacher accepts a ride from Carmen Greer — a woman fleeing an abusive husband who is due home from prison. By the time Reacher understands the full picture of the Greer family, the Echo County ranch, and the three hired killers heading for it, he is already too involved to walk away.

Prince Yarvi was born with a crippled hand — he would never be the warrior his culture demands. He plans to be a minister instead. Then his father and brother are murdered, and Yarvi is forced onto a throne he doesn't want, sworn to revenge he doesn't know how to take — before being betrayed, enslaved, and left for dead.

Actor Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman ride motorcycles east from London through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, and Alaska to New York — 31,000 miles through some of the most extreme terrain on earth.