Best Action Adventure Books to Read
Top 10 fantasy books
The action sequences turn into an adventure, and the protagonist will be on a personal journey or to different geographical locations. It is fast-paced and the tension mounts as the clock ticks. These stories offer to solve problems in both violent and non-violent situations. This genre usually mesh with other genres such as horror, suspense-thriller, science-fiction, fantasy.
The cruel sea
The Cruel Sea is a 1951 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat. It follows the lives of a group of Royal Navy sailors fighting the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War. It contains seven chapters, each describing a year during the war. This sea adventure novel is about a war story and is considered one of the foremost portrayals of the Royal Navy’s battle against both the sea and the Germans.
The action commences in 1939. Lieutenant-Commander George Ericson, a Merchant Navy and Royal Naval Reserve officer, is recalled to the Royal Navy and given command of the fictitious Flower-class covette HMS Compass Rose, newly built to escort convoys. His officers are mostly new to the Navy, especially the two new sub-lieutenants, Lockhart and Ferraby. Only Ericson and the petty officers are in any way experienced.
The cruel sea
by Nicholas Monsarrat
White Fang
By Jack London
White Fang
White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London — and the name of the book’s eponymous character, a wild wolfdog.
The story details White Fang’s journey to domestication in Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London’s best-known work, The Call of the Wild (1903), which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.
The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klodike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley. California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian Tamil boy from Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age.
The book begins with a note from the author, which is an integral part of the novel. Unusually, the note describes entirely fictional events. It serves to establish and enforce one of the book’s main themes: the relativity of truth.
Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is an autobiographical work by American writer Edward Abbey, originally published in 1968. His fourth book and his first book-length non-fiction work, it follows three fictional books: Jonathan Troy, The Brave Cowboy, and Fire on the Mountain.
Desert Solitaire is a collection of treatises and autobiographical excerpts describing Abbey’s experiences as a park ranger and wilderness enthusiast in 1956 and 1957. The opening chapters, First Morning and Solitaire, focus on the author’s experiences arriving at and creating a life within Arches National Monument. In this early period the park is relatively undeveloped: road access and camping facilities are basic, and there is a low volume of tourist traffic.
Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
by B. Traven
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1927 adventure novel by German author B. Traven, whose identity remains unknown. In the book, two destitute American men in Mexico of the 1920s join an older American prospector in a search for gold.
The story opens in the oil boomtown of Tampico, Mexico in the early 1920s. Dobbs, an expatriate who hails from “an industrial American city” is unemployed, penniless and reduced to bumming spare change from American tourists. Loitering on Tampico’s main plaza, he collects a number of generous handouts from well-to-do men who wear white suits. To Dobbs’ dismay, he discovers that he has been accosting the same individual repeatedly. The irate tourist at last upbraids the panhandler, dismissing him with a half-peso tip.
Scaramouche
Scaramouche is an historical novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1921. A romantic adventure, Scaramouche tells the story of a young lawyer during the French Revolution. In the course of his adventures he becomes an actor portraying “Scaramouche”.
Andre-Louis Moreau, educated as a lawyer, lives in the village of Gavrillac in Brittany with his godfather Quentin de Kercadiou, the Lord of Gavrillac, who refuses to disclose Moreau’s parentage. Moreau has grown up alongside Aline, Kercadiou’s niece, and their relationship is as cousins. Because he loves her as a cousin, he warns her against marrying the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr; however, she is ambitious and wishes to marry high, so she ignores him.
Scaramouche
by Rafael Sabatini
Escape from Baghdad
by Saad Z. Hossain
Escape from Baghdad
Escape from Baghdad is a thriller adventure novel by a Bangladeshi author Saad Z. Hossain. The novel is written in English and published in 2015.
Two down on their luck black-marketeers, Dagr and Kinza, have inherited a very important prisoner: the former star torturer of Saddam’s recently collapsed Ba’athist regime, Captain Hamid, who promises them untold riches if they smuggle him to Mosul. With the heat on, they enlist the help of Private Hoffman, their partner in crime and a U.S. Marine, who undertakes to help them escape the authorities
The Beach
The Beach is a 1996 novel by English author Alex Garland. Set in Thailand, it is the story of a young backpacker’s search for a legendary, idyllic and isolated beach untouched by tourism, and his time there in its small, international community of backpackers.
In a cheap hotel on the Khao San Road in Bankok, Richard, a young British backpacker, meets a mentally disturbed Scotsman going by the alias of Daffy Duck, who gives him a hand-drawn map with directions to a beautiful island with a hidden lagoon and beach, located in the Gulf of Thailand and inaccessible to tourists. Shortly after receiving the map, Richard discovers that Daffy has committed suicide. Wanting company in his search, Richard befriends a travelling French couple, Étienne and Françoise, and the trio sets out to find what they hope might be an untouched paradise.
The Beach
by Alex Garland
King Solomon's Mines
by H. Rider Haggardi
King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon’s Mines is a novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party.
Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and white hunter based in Durban, in what is now South Africa, is approached by aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good, seeking his help finding Sir Henry’s brother, who was last seen travelling north into the unexplored interior on a quest for the fabled King Solomon’s Mines. Quatermain has a mysterious map purporting to lead to the mines, but had never taken it seriously. However, he agrees to lead an expedition in return for a share of the treasure, or a stipend for his son if he is killed along the way. He has little hope they will return alive, but reasons that he has already outlived most people in his profession, so dying in this manner at least ensures that his son will be provided for. They also take along a mysterious native, Umbopa, who seems more regal, handsome and well-spoken than most porters of his class, but who is very anxious to join the party.