The Call of the Wild

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.

Daniel Defoe

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.

Johann David Wyss

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.

R. M. Ballantyne

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.

Jack London