White Fang

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

A stolen dog is shipped north into the Klondike and unlearns every soft thing he knew. Short, hard and told almost entirely from inside the animal.

Jack London