Adventure novels drop you somewhere you have never been and make the way back the whole point. Here you will find 41 classic adventure novels in PDF format, free to read online or download.
These are the books that built the genre: shipwrecks and desert islands, buried treasure and mutinies at sea, jungle expeditions toward lost civilizations. Every one of them is here complete, from Alexandre Dumas to Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Classics
Classic Adventure Novels
The adventure novels anyone new to the genre should read first. Swordfights, river journeys and long roads walked by people with no idea what waits at the end.
Four soldiers, one queen's secret, and a cardinal who wants them dead. Dumas turned court intrigue into pure momentum, and this complete unabridged edition keeps every duel and every betrayal intact.
A sailor is framed, buried alive in a sea fortress, and comes back rich, unrecognizable and patient. The greatest revenge story ever written, complete and unabridged.
An old man reads too many chivalry books and rides out to fix a world that stopped needing fixing. Both parts complete, with the windmills, the inns and the long argument with Sancho.
Four voyages to places that do not exist, each one a mirror held up to the reader's own country. Swift wrote a travel book that turns into a demolition of politics, science and human vanity.
Tournaments, a besieged castle, Robin Hood in the background and a knight back from the Crusades to a country that has moved on without him. The novel that invented historical fiction as we know it.
A boy and a runaway slave float down the Mississippi on a raft and keep running into the worst of the shore. Twain wrote it in the voice of a child and it changed how American novels sound.
Whitewashed fences, a graveyard at midnight, a cave with a murderer in it. Tom Sawyer is boyhood written by someone who remembered it exactly, and this is the complete text.
Two sisters escorted through hostile forest during a colonial war, with a scout and the last two Mohicans as their only chance. The frontier novel that every later one is measured against.
An English fop nobody takes seriously is pulling aristocrats out of Paris under the guillotine. The original secret identity hero, decades before anyone put on a cape.
A lawyer watches his friend die in a rigged duel and reinvents himself twice, as a revolutionary orator and as a masked comedian, to get close enough to answer for it. Sabatini at full speed.
An English traveller happens to be the double of a king who has just been drugged and kidnapped, so he takes the throne for a week. Fast, funny and the blueprint for every royal impostor story since.
A masked rider carves his initial into the men who abuse the poor, while the useless nobleman everyone dismisses turns out to be the same person. The novel that created Zorro.
A relief column reaches a desert fort held only by dead men propped at the walls. Three brothers, a stolen sapphire and the Foreign Legion, told backwards from that opening image.
Two drifters walk into the mountains to make themselves kings of a country nobody has mapped, and it works until one of them forgets he is not a god. Short, brutal and perfectly built.
A girl follows a rabbit down a hole and lands in a country where logic is the joke. Nonsense written with mathematical precision, and still the strangest journey in English fiction.
Everything the adventure novel owes to the ocean: buried treasure, mutinies, whaling ships and captains you would not want to cross. Stevenson and Melville set the rules here and nobody has really broken them since.
A map falls into a boy's hands and a one legged cook signs on as ship's cook. Every pirate cliche you know started here, and none of them were cliches yet.
A whaling voyage that turns into one man's war against an animal, and a book that stops the story whenever it feels like explaining rope, oil or the colour white. Complete and unabridged.
A doctor is sold into slavery for treating the wrong patient, seizes a ship and becomes the most feared captain in the Caribbean. The best pure pirate novel ever written.
An orphan is sold onto a ship by his own uncle and ends up crossing the Highlands with a wanted rebel. A chase novel with two men who never quite trust each other.
A spoiled millionaire's son goes overboard from a liner and is fished out by a fishing schooner that will not turn around for him. He works the season, and the season works on him.
Two friends on a small yacht in the North Sea sandbanks notice something that does not add up, and keep pulling at it. The novel that invented the modern spy thriller.
A literary critic is pulled from a shipwreck by a sealing schooner and finds himself under a captain who runs his crew by force and argues philosophy while he does it. London's hardest book.
One person, one hostile place, and no way out but through. These adventure novels are about what someone builds when there is nothing left to build with.
One man, one island, twenty eight years of building everything from nothing. The book that started the whole castaway genre and still reads like an inventory of survival.
A shipwrecked family turns a tropical island into a working farm, one invention at a time. Less about danger than about what people can build when there is nothing to build with.
Three boys wash up on a Pacific island with almost nothing and have to make it work, until pirates arrive and the idyll stops. The book Stevenson and Golding both wrote back to.
The Call of the Wild run in reverse: a wolf born in the Yukon is dragged toward people, and has to survive them first. The starvation opening is among the best London wrote.
Expeditions into territory the maps left blank. Lost cities, prehistoric survivors and the uncomfortable questions that come with going where you were not invited.
A river journey upcountry to collect an ivory agent who has stopped answering, and who has become something nobody wants to look at directly. Short, dense and impossible to shake off.
A hunter, a baronet and a naval officer follow a three hundred year old map across the desert toward a diamond mine nobody has come back from. The first lost world novel.
Quatermain cannot settle down, so he goes back inland after a rumour of a white civilisation nobody has reached. The direct sequel to King Solomon's Mines, and wilder than it.
A shard of pottery sends two men to a lost African kingdom ruled by a queen who has been waiting two thousand years for someone in particular. One of the best selling novels ever written.
An impossible professor claims there is a plateau in the Amazon where dinosaurs are still alive, and dares four men to go and check. Every lost world story since owes it something.
A shipwrecked infant is raised by apes and teaches himself to read from his dead father's books without ever hearing a human voice. The original, complete and much stranger than the films.
An orphan on the streets of Lahore attaches himself to a wandering lama and gets recruited into imperial spycraft along the way. Half spy novel, half road book, entirely its own thing.
Verne sent his readers under the sea, into the earth and around the world before any of it was possible. His Extraordinary Voyages are the blueprint every adventure writer has worked from since.
A precise man bets his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and a detective who thinks he is a bank robber follows him the whole way. Verne's most purely enjoyable novel.
Three men hunting a sea monster end up prisoners inside it, and it turns out to be a submarine run by a captain with a grudge against the surface world. The Nautilus in full.
A coded note sends a professor and his reluctant nephew down an Icelandic volcano toward an ocean nobody knew was there. Verne's descent, complete and unabridged.
Five prisoners escape a siege by balloon and land on an uncharted island, where they rebuild civilisation from scratch while something on the island keeps helping them.
A message in a bottle is water damaged so badly that only the latitude survives, so the rescuers follow the entire parallel around the world. Verne's biggest and funniest expedition.
Three men attempt to cross Africa by hydrogen balloon, betting that they can stay above every problem below them. The novel that launched the Extraordinary Voyages.
A gun club with no war left to fight decides to fire a manned projectile at the moon, and does the arithmetic in public. Written a century before it happened, and closer than it had any right to be.
A captain who will not name his destination drives his crew north through the ice toward the pole, and past the point where obsession and command separate. Verne's coldest book.
That is our full collection of adventure novels, all free and all complete. If you want to stay with one author, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling each have a page of their own.
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