Best Adventure Books

Locke and Jean are coerced by the Bondsmagi into rigging an election in Karthain — and Locke discovers his opponent is Sabetha, the one woman he has always loved and never quite managed to win.

During the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, a mysterious English nobleman known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel leads a daring league to rescue condemned French aristocrats from the guillotine, while his wife Marguerite desperately tries to uncover his true identity.

Digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, Jack Reacher is found by a dying detective and pulled into a decades-old mystery from the Vietnam War. Lee Child's third Reacher thriller blends a propulsive hunt with one of the series' nastiest villains.

In sixteenth-century Europe, Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald are caught on opposing sides of the religious wars tearing apart England, France, and the Netherlands, as Protestant and Catholic factions fight for the soul of the continent.

A tech consortium races into the Congo rainforest to find a lost city — and the deposits of industrial diamonds it holds. They are joined by a primatologist and her signing gorilla named Amy, who may hold the key to what killed the previous expedition. Crichton combines African adventure, corporate espionage, and animal intelligence research.

A bored aristocrat escapes her London life for the Cornwall coast, where she discovers a French pirate ship hidden in a creek and falls in love with its captain — du Maurier's most overtly romantic novel and a study of the desire for freedom.

Eugene Henderson — a huge, rich, impossible Connecticut pig farmer with a voice in his head that insists 'I want, I want' — abandons everything and travels to Africa, where he becomes entangled with two tribes and discovers something about what he wants.

Set in twelfth-century England during the aftermath of the Crusades, Ivanhoe follows the disinherited Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he jousts for honor, navigates treacherous Norman politics, and fights alongside a mysterious Black Knight revealed to be King Richard I.

Reacher finally reaches Virginia to meet the woman whose voice intrigued him, only to find himself arrested, framed, and told he may have a daughter. Lee Child's eighteenth Reacher thriller is a personal, fugitive-on-the-run story with unusually high emotional stakes.

Anthony Hope's classic swashbuckling adventure. Holidaying in the fictional kingdom of Ruritania, the English gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll is recruited to impersonate the king — his distant look-alike — when the monarch is drugged and abducted, plunging him into court intrigue, swordplay, and forbidden love.

Melville's first novel, based on his actual time among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands after jumping ship, is part adventure narrative, part ethnography, and part critique of Western civilization's assumptions about 'savagery.'

A simple good deed for an elderly couple drops Jack Reacher into the middle of a brutal gang war between Ukrainian and Albanian mobs. Lee Child's twenty-fourth Reacher thriller is among the most violent in the series, trading subtlety for relentless, body-stacking momentum.

James Clavell's sweeping Asian Saga novel set in 1862 Japan. As Western traders cling to their foothold at Yokohama, the 'gai-jin' (foreigners) are caught in a web of intrigue, violence, and culture clash amid the dying days of the samurai and the birth of modern Japan — an epic of commerce, power, and East meeting West.

Reacher witnesses a woman pushed under a bus in a staged suicide and refuses to let it lie. Lee and Andrew Child's twenty-seventh Reacher thriller widens into a conspiracy involving a corrupt private prison, weaving multiple storylines toward a violent collision.

Jamaica, 1665: privateer Captain Edward Hunter assembles a crew to raid the heavily fortified Spanish galleon El Trinidad, moored at Matanceros under the guns of a famously cruel Spanish commander. Published posthumously from a completed manuscript found on Crichton's computer after his death.

H. Rider Haggard's hugely influential Victorian adventure. Following an ancient relic into the African interior, Holly and Leo Vincey discover a lost kingdom ruled by Ayesha — 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' — a beautiful, immortal queen who has waited two thousand years for the return of her murdered love.

Saint-Exupéry's debut novel follows a mail pilot flying routes over the Sahara and a narrator's meditation on love, duty, and the life of aviation against the backdrop of a woman waiting on the ground.

In a small Tennessee town, Jack Reacher saves a hapless IT manager from a kidnapping and uncovers a ransomware plot with national-security stakes. The Sentinel marks the first Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew, beginning the series handover.

Johann David Wyss's classic tale of survival and ingenuity. Shipwrecked on a tropical island, a resourceful Swiss family builds a new life from the wilderness, taming the land and its creatures in an episodic adventure that has delighted young readers for two centuries.

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

Harry Morgan, a boat captain in Depression-era Key West, is forced into smuggling and running rum to survive. The novel Hemingway considered his worst tracks Morgan's degradation against the backdrop of wealthy vacationers whose money insulates them from consequence.

Jazz Bashara is a porter and small-time smuggler in Artemis — humanity's first and only city on the Moon. When she's offered an opportunity to pull off a corporate heist that could solve her financial problems permanently, she discovers the job connects to a conspiracy that threatens the entire lunar colony.

A MIT graduate student accidentally builds a time machine that can only travel forward — each jump taking him exponentially further into the future — and must find a way back or keep jumping into an ever more distant Earth.

Robert Langdon is called to Washington D.C. under false pretenses and plunged into a frantic one-night race through the Capitol's corridors of power. Freemason symbolism, Ancient Mysteries, and a villain whose identity reshapes the entire narrative — Brown's most American thriller.