Best Adventure Books

The first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin novels. In the Napoleonic Wars, the newly promoted Captain Jack Aubrey takes command of his first ship and forms an unlikely friendship with the physician and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, launching one of historical fiction's great series.

Three mail pilots fly dangerous night routes over South America while their director, Rivière, drives them beyond human limits in service of a vision of what aviation can be — a meditation on duty, mortality, and the cost of achievement.

Hamburg, 1996. Reacher is pulled from his regular Army assignment and placed in a clandestine inter-agency team — the so-called night school — tasked with identifying an unknown buyer who is about to pay $100 million for something unknown. A prequel-in-spirit showing Reacher at his military peak.

Reacher decides to visit the New Hampshire town where his father was born — and finds no record of the Reacher family ever existing there. Simultaneously, a young Canadian couple becomes trapped at a remote motel where nothing is as it appears. A rare entry in the series that invites the reader to think about who Reacher really is.

A near-impossible sniper shot attempted against the French president — from 1,400 yards — points to one of four living marksmen, including Reacher's old adversary John Kott. Reacher is sent to Paris and London to find the shooter before a G8 summit becomes a killing ground.

David Grann investigates the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for an ancient lost civilization he called Z.

Eustace and his schoolmate Jill Pole are sent to Narnia to rescue the lost Prince Rilian, held captive underground by the Lady of the Green Kirtle.

Henry Worsley, a British explorer obsessed with Ernest Shackleton, attempts to be the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unsupported — and does not survive the attempt.

A detour through rural Nebraska puts Reacher between the Duncan family — a violent local crime dynasty that controls everything for miles — and the frightened community that has lived under their thumb for decades. A stripped-back Reacher story with the feel of a modern western.

Reacher hitches a ride with three strangers on a Nebraska highway and quickly determines that one of them is a killer. An FBI roadblock, a missing woman, and a trailer full of secrets turn a routine ride into something far more dangerous.

Peter Blood, an Irish physician unjustly condemned for treason after the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, is transported to Barbados as a slave and ultimately escapes to become the Caribbean's most celebrated — and principled — pirate captain.

Eliza Sommers, a young Chilean woman, follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and, dressed as a man, makes her way across a country shaped by greed, violence, and the collision of races and cultures. Allende's most adventurous novel in structure — a picaresque across two continents.

In a world where humans have nearly vanished, a young man named Vic lives in a forest with his found family of robots. When Vic's mechanical father is taken by the Authority — the machine system that controls what remains of civilisation — Vic and his companions must venture into a world of metal and memory to bring him home. Klune's retelling of Pinocchio.

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure. After being cheated and kidnapped by a treacherous uncle, young David Balfour is shipwrecked and thrown together with the dashing Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart, embarking on a perilous flight across the Scottish Highlands.

Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece, set in British India. Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, grows up on the streets of Lahore and is drawn into both a Tibetan lama's spiritual quest and the espionage of the 'Great Game' between empires, in a rich, vivid portrait of a vast and varied land.

In the four days before Vesuvius erupts in 79 AD, a young Roman engineer named Attilius discovers that the great aqueduct serving the Bay of Naples has been poisoned — and that the corruption he uncovers runs as deep as the mountain's roots.

Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen have fled Camorr for Tal Verrar, where they plan the most ambitious con of their careers — robbing the impregnable Sinspire casino — until a naval commander forces them to become pirates instead.

A Cro-Magnon girl orphaned by an earthquake is taken in by a Neanderthal clan, and her different nature — her upright posture, her ability to learn and innovate — puts her in perpetual conflict with a social order not built for her.

A New Year's Eve death on a military base in 1990 pulls Major Jack Reacher into a murder investigation as the Cold War ends. Lee Child rewinds the clock to Reacher's army days, delivering a tense, procedural prequel and a rare look at the man in uniform.

Dodie Smith's beloved children's classic, the basis for the Disney films. When their fifteen puppies are stolen by the fiendish Cruella de Vil, the Dalmatians Pongo and Missis set out across the English countryside to rescue them — and the ninety-seven others marked for her fur coats.

Will, an orphan boy at Castle Redmont who dreams of becoming a knight, is instead chosen as apprentice to Halt — the kingdom's most enigmatic and skilled Ranger — and must develop the arts of stealth, archery, and tracking to help face a rising evil threatening the kingdom.

Shipwrecked alone on a tropical island near Trinidad, Robinson Crusoe survives for twenty-eight years — building a shelter, growing food, domesticating animals, maintaining a calendar, and eventually encountering the man he calls Friday. Often called the first English novel, and the founding text of the survival narrative.

A coffee on a New York street corner draws Jack Reacher into a kidnapping case for a ruthless private military contractor. Lee Child's tenth Reacher thriller turns a tiny observation into a twisting hunt that crosses the Atlantic to a tense English finale.

A West Point class ring in a pawn shop window sends Jack Reacher across the West to find the woman who earned it. Lee Child's twenty-second Reacher thriller becomes a quieter, more humane mystery about opioids, sacrifice, and the wounded veterans the country forgot.