25 Best Outdoor Adventure & Wilderness Survival Books


outdoor adventure books fiction non-fiction reading nature

If you’re looking for a book to accompany you on your outdoor adventures into the wilderness this summer, here’s some of the best in fiction and non-fiction adventure reading that’s about people surviving and conquering the wilderness and the great outdoors.

This list of the Best Outdoor Adventure & Wilderness Survival Books is divided up into fiction and non-fiction books.

I think the first book I ever discovered in this genre was John Krakauer’s Into the Wild. My childhood best friend, Iris, was assigned to read the book for school or something. I picked it up off her desk to see what it was about, was totally captivated by the story and ended up reading the whole thing. Fun fact: the graduation scene from the movie version of it was filmed at my college graduation ceremony!

Anyway, hopefully something on this list will inspire and enthrall you. Just remember to stay safe out there, and happy reading!

Have you read any of these titles, or is there something you were expecting to see here that’s missing? Feel free to drop a comment below!

Fiction
Non-Fiction


Fiction Outdoor Adventure Books

The River
Peter Heller

What It's About: The story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip—of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water...

See the Full Summary and Review of The River

Publication Date: March 5, 2019
  
thriller mystery adventure


The Call of the Wild/White Fang/To Build a Fire
Jack London

What It's About: The Call of the Wild—Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

To this day Jack London is the most widely read American writer in the world," E. L. Doctorow wrote in The New York Times Book Review. Generally considered to be London's greatest achievement, The Call of the Wild brought him international acclaim when it was published in 1903...

Publication Date: September 14, 1998
  
classics classic adventure


Migrations
Charlotte McConaghy

What It's About: Migrations is about a woman who goes to the ends of the earth in search of herself and to track what just might be the last migration of Arctic terns, birds that travel from pole to pole every year.

It’s also about love, adventure, climate change, and what happens when a person simultaneously runs away from her past and runs straight towards it. Migrations gets richer with every scene as you learn more about Franny Stone—why she boards a boat full of fishermen, why birds call to her, how she fell in love with her husband, and how death stalks her at every turn.

From Antarctica to a prison in Ireland, Australia to Galway, Franny traverses the world and with every turn of the page, you learn more about why she’s always on the move. The novel’s pacing is phenomenal—and the candor, veracity, and clarity with which it’s written make it feel like a memoir.

Publication Date: August 4, 2020
  
science fiction book club literary fiction


The Salt Path
Raynor Winn

What It's About: The uplifting true tale of the couple who lost everything and embarked on a journey of salvation across the windswept South West coastline.

With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky.

Yet through every step, every encounter and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey. The Salt Path is an honest and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.

Publication Date: March 22, 2018
  
non fiction memoir travel

In the Distance
Hernán Diaz

What It's About: A young Swedish boy finds himself penniless and alone in California. He travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the west. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend...

Publication Date: October 3, 2017
  
historical fiction western book club

Raft of Stars
Andrew J. Graff

What It's About: When two hardscrabble young boys think they’ve committed a crime, they flee into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Will the adults trying to find and protect them reach them before it’s too late?

It’s the summer of 1994 in Claypot, Wisconsin, and the lives of ten-year-old Fischer “Fish” Branson and Dale “Bread” Breadwin are shaped by the two fathers they don’t talk about...

Publication Date: March 23, 2021
  
historical fiction adventure coming of age


The River at Night
Erica Ferencik

What It's About: A “raw, relentless, and heart-poundingly real” (Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author) thriller set against the harsh beauty of the Maine wilderness, The River at Night charts the journey of four friends as they fight to survive the aftermath of a white water rafting accident.

Winifred Allen needs a vacation...

Publication Date: January 10, 2017
  
thriller mystery thriller mystery


Force of Nature
Jane Harper

What It's About: When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the muddy path.

But one of the women doesn’t come out of the woods. And each of her companions tells a slightly different story about what happened...

Publication Date: September 26, 2017
  
mystery thriller crime


Where the Lost Wander
Amy Harmon

What It's About: In this epic and haunting love story set on the Oregon Trail, a family and their unlikely protector find their way through peril, uncertainty, and loss. The Overland Trail, 1853: Naomi May never expected to be widowed at twenty. Eager to leave her grief behind, she sets off with her family for a life out West...

Publication Date: April 28, 2020
  
historical fiction romance historical


Life of Pi
Yann Martel

What It's About: Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Publication Date: September 11, 2001
  
fantasy classics books i own


Last of the Breed
Louis L'Amour

What It's About: Here is the kind of authentically detailed epic novel that has become Louis L’Amour’s hallmark. It is the compelling story of U.S. Air Force Major Joe Mack, a man born out of time. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia and he escapes a Soviet prison camp, he must call upon the ancient skills of his Indian forebears to survive the vast Siberian wilderness...

Publication Date: June 1, 1986
  
western adventure westerns



Non-Fiction Outdoor Adventure Books

Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer

What It's About: Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons...

Publication Date: January 13, 1996
  
non fiction biography adventure


Wild
Cheryl Strayed

What It's About: A powerful, blazingly honest the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
 
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed...

Publication Date: March 20, 2012
  
non fiction memoir book club


Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer

What It's About: Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest, when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and faced a battle against hurricane-force winds, exposure, and the effects of altitude, which ended in the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history...

Publication Date: May 1, 1997
  
non fiction adventure memoir


A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson

What It's About: The Appalachian Trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America—majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike, it’s probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaining guide you’ll find...

Publication Date: May 5, 1998
  
non fiction travel memoir


The Stranger in the Woods
Michael Finkel

What It's About: Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. This is the remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality--not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest...

Publication Date: March 7, 2017
  
non fiction biography audiobook


Becoming Odyssa: Epic Adventures on the Appalachian Trail
Jennifer Pharr Davis

What It's About: After graduating from college, Jennifer isn’t sure what she wants to do with her life. Through inexperienced and unprepared, she feels drawn to the Appalachian Trail and sets out along on the long-distance footpath that stretches 2, 175 miles from Georgia to Maine.

The next five months are the most physically and emotionally challenging of her life—coping with blisters and aching shoulders, hiking through endless torrents of rain and a blizzard, facing unwanted company and encountering tragedy...

Publication Date: March 16, 2020
  
non fiction travel hiking


Alone on the Wall
Alex Honnold

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 2, 2018
  

Madhouse at the End of the Earth
Julian Sancton

What It's About: In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory. His destination was the uncharted end of the the icy continent of Antarctica.

But de Gerlache’s plans to be first to the magnetic South Pole would swiftly go awry...

Publication Date: May 4, 2021
  
non fiction history adventure


The Twenty-Ninth Day
Alex Messenger

What It's About: A six-hundred-mile canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness is a seventeen-year-old’s dream adventure, but after he is mauled by a grizzly bear, it’s all about staying alive.This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts seventeen-year-old Alex Messenger’s near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra...

Publication Date: November 12, 2019
  
non fiction memoir adventure


The Lost Boys of Montauk
Amanda M. Fairbanks

What It's About:

Publication Date: May 25, 2021
  
non fiction history giveaways


In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nathaniel Philbrick

What It's About: "With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed - at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow...

Publication Date: May 8, 2000
  
history non fiction adventure


Miracle in the Andes
Nando Parrado

What It's About: In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.
Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team, as well as their family members and supporters, to an exhibition game in Chile had crashed somewhere deep in the Andes...

Publication Date: May 9, 2006
  
non fiction survival memoir



outdoor adventure books, wilderness survival books, fiction and non-fiction

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