The Best Adventure Books: 12 Classics Worth Reading
Adventure fiction covers a lot of ground: sword fights in seventeenth century Paris, desert islands, sled dogs in the Klondike, dinosaurs on an Amazon plateau. This list gathers twelve of the best adventure books, all of them classics that have stayed in print and kept finding readers long after their authors died.
The order reflects how much interest readers at Blurby Posters show in each title, so the most looked-at books come first. Several appear on school reading lists and in the Modern Library 100, and a few more or less invented the subgenres that followed them. Each entry explains what happens and what makes the book notable, so you can pick the one that suits you.
The Three Musketeers
Dumas published The Three Musketeers in 1844, working with the ghostwriter Auguste Maquet, and it remains the defining swashbuckler. Set between 1625 and 1628, it follows young d'Artagnan from Gascony to Paris, where he offends Athos, Porthos and Aramis in a single afternoon and ends up fighting alongside them instead. The plot turns on Queen Anne's diamonds, Cardinal Richelieu's scheming and the spy Milady de Winter. Dumas also uses the story to take aim at the injustices and absurdities of the Ancien Régime.
Around The World In Eighty Days
Verne's 1872 novel sends the exact and solitary Phileas Fogg out of the Reform Club on a £20,000 wager that he can circle the globe in eighty days. With his new French valet Passepartout, he travels by train, steamer, elephant and pilot boat, rescuing Aouda from a sati ritual in India and shaking off Detective Fix, who is convinced Fogg is a bank robber. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works and a regular on school reading lists and all-time novel rankings.
Treasure Island
Published in 1883, Stevenson's story of "buccaneers and buried gold" did more than almost any other book to shape how pirates look in popular culture: the treasure map with an X, the deserted tropical island, the one-legged seaman with a parrot. Jim Hawkins finds Captain Flint's chart in a dead sailor's sea chest and sails on the Hispaniola with Long John Silver among the crew. It is a coming-of-age story as much as an adventure, and it has been adapted more often than nearly any other novel.
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe's 1719 book is often credited with marking the start of realistic fiction, and some call it the first English novel. Crusoe is shipwrecked on an island near the Orinoco and spends 28 years there, salvaging tools, building a home, raising goats and keeping a calendar of notches before he encounters cannibals and mutineers. The first edition named Crusoe himself as author, and many readers took it for a true travelogue. Alexander Selkirk, a real Scottish castaway, is thought to have inspired it.
The Mysterious Island
Serialised from 1874, The Mysterious Island is Verne's crossover sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and In Search of the Castaways. Five Union prisoners escape the Siege of Richmond by balloon and crash on an uncharted Pacific island, where the engineer Cyrus Smith leads them in making fire, pottery, iron, nitroglycerin and even a ship. A string of inexplicable rescues suggests someone unseen is watching over them. Verne drew openly on Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson.
The Call Of The Wild
Jack London's 1903 novel made his reputation. Buck, a 140-pound St Bernard cross, is stolen from a California ranch and sold into service as a sled dog in the Klondike during the Gold Rush, where he learns the law of club and fang and fights his way to lead the team. London spent about a year in the Yukon, and his observations supply much of the detail.
The Lost World
Conan Doyle told his editor that his ambition was "to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective story". The Lost World, serialised in the Strand in 1912, sends the belligerent Professor Challenger, the sceptical Summerlee, the hunter Lord John Roxton and the journalist Malone to an Amazon plateau where dinosaurs still live. The expedition gets across on a felled tree and is then stranded there by a vengeful porter. Challenger went on to appear in later Doyle stories.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel grew out of a stage play that ran for more than 2,000 performances in London, and the book was an immediate success too. Set during the Reign of Terror, it follows Sir Percy Blakeney, apparently an idle English fop and in fact the swordsman and escape artist who smuggles French aristocrats away from the guillotine. His wife Marguerite, blackmailed by the French envoy Chauvelin, unwittingly helps expose him. The hidden-identity hero has been copied endlessly since.
The Sea-Wolf
The Sea-Wolf is a psychological adventure story from 1904. The critic Humphrey Van Weyden survives a ferry collision in San Francisco Bay and is picked up by the sealing schooner Ghost, whose captain Wolf Larsen is brutal, brilliant and contemptuous of human life. Van Weyden is made cabin boy and has to toughen up to survive the crew and a failed mutiny. The first printing of forty thousand copies sold out before publication, and Ambrose Bierce called Larsen "that tremendous creation".
Rupert Of Hentzau
Hope's sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda was written in 1895 and published in book form in 1898. Three years on, Queen Flavia's letter to Rudolf Rassendyll is stolen by the exiled Rupert of Hentzau, who sees a way back into royal favour. Rassendyll returns to Ruritania, is forced to impersonate the king once more after Rupert shoots him, and fights Rupert in a duel. Read the first book before this one.
The Prisoner Of Zenda
The King of Ruritania is drugged by his half-brother on the eve of his coronation, so his attendants persuade a visiting English gentleman who happens to look just like him to take his place. Then the real king is abducted and held at the castle of Zenda. Hope's 1894 novel was popular enough to spawn a whole genre, the Ruritanian romance, in which stories play out in invented Central European countries. Syldavia in the Tintin books is a descendant.
Kidnapped
Stevenson's 1886 novel follows 17-year-old David Balfour, who goes to claim his inheritance at the House of Shaws, is nearly killed by his miserly uncle Ebenezer and is then knocked out and carried off on a brig bound for the Carolinas. He falls in with the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, a real historical figure, and the book is built around real events including the Appin Murder. Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges and Hilary Mantel have all praised it. A sequel, Catriona, followed in 1893.
Most of these titles are short, cheap to find and available free in the public domain, so there is little risk in starting one and moving on if it does not suit you. If you want pure swordplay, start with Dumas or Orczy. For survival and solitude, Defoe, Verne or London.