Fiction

The first volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows two young Texans who ride into Mexico in 1949 looking for a way of life that's already vanishing. The horsemanship is real. The landscape is merciless. The prose is some of the finest in the English language.

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel interweaves the story of a disabled historian with the frontier adventures of his grandparents in the nineteenth-century West. It's about marriage, landscape, and the compromises that settlement demands.

Annie Proulx's epic novel traces two families across 300 years of North American deforestation. It begins in the forests of New France in 1693 and ends in the present, and its argument is both historical and urgent: we have been cutting trees since the day we arrived, and we have not stopped.

Set in the Pacific Northwest, Before the Wind is a deeply funny fictional account of a lovably maddening family that communicates best through sailing. (Wes Anderson, please option the film rights.) There’s a loudmouth dad—Where’s the wind? No! Those waves are old news!—a try-to-fix-everything middle son, a precocious daughter who can out-sail nearly everyone, and a grandpa who dreams in boat design schemata. Dysfunctional, maybe, but boy can the Johannssens race. If boating is in your DNA, you might recognize yourself here. If you don’t know a thing about boating, you’ll learn a lot—about sailing legends like Joshua Slocum, insight into the siren song of racing, and things to consider before buying that “free” boat in your neighbor’s backyard. Ultimately, the story reminds us adventure is often the best therapy, and that it’s wildly rewarding to trust some of life’s decisions to the wind.

Kerouac's dark, boozy novel about a crack-up in a cabin on the California coast. Not the Beat celebration people expect — it's a book about a man coming apart, and the Pacific Ocean doesn't care. The descriptions of Big Sur's landscape are some of the most visceral he ever wrote.

Abbey's strangest novel — a love story set at a fire lookout in the Arizona high country. Darker and more personal than The Monkey Wrench Gang, it's the book where Abbey's tenderness and his nihilism collide. Not his most famous, but possibly his most revealing.

McCarthy's anti-western is the most violent novel in American literature and also one of the most beautiful. Set in the borderlands of the 1850s, it follows a band of scalp hunters through a landscape so vast and indifferent it becomes its own character. Not a book about nature — a book about what happens to people in nature's absence.

M. John Harrison's novel about climbing in northern England — the obsession, the relationships it destroys, the moments of transcendence on gritstone. Not an adventure story — a literary novel that happens to take place on rock. One of the best novels ever written about climbing.

Kerouac's novel drawn from his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades and his subsequent travels. Rawer than Dharma Bums, and haunted by the solitude of the mountaintop. The lookout chapters are among the best things he wrote.

Kerouac's novel about mountain climbing, Buddhism, and the search for meaning in postwar America is looser and warmer than On the Road. Based on his friendship with Gary Snyder (thinly disguised as Japhy Ryder), it captures a moment when wilderness and spiritual practice converged in the American imagination.

Abbey's novel about a New Mexico rancher fighting the government's attempt to seize his land for a missile range. Less well-known than his desert nonfiction but equally defiant. The old man on the mountain is Abbey's purest fictional self.

In Watkins’ poetic and post-apocalyptic debut, a relentless wave of sand called the Amargosa Dune Sea drifts across the southwest, swallowing whole everything in its path—including, if they’re not careful, young lovers Luz and Ray, along with a child they rescued while fleeing Los Angeles. Sure, it’s just a novel, but where people were once drawn west for its titular trio, this dystopian spin on the effects of climate change offers a chilling preview of what might eventually drive us out.

Gary Paulsen is one of the all-time masters of children’s literature, and Hatchet is arguably his magnum opus. Ask any adult who read the book as a child and they’ll recount the violent plane crash in the rugged Canadian wilderness, 13-year-old Brian’s realization that he is the lone survivor, his panicked struggle to build a fire, and his ensuing fight for survival armed only with his wits and a trusty hatchet.

Abbey's sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang — more sabotage, more desert, more defiance. Written in the last year of his life and published posthumously. Not as tight as the original, but animated by the same furious love of the land.

Roger Hubank's novel about climbing in the Lake District — ambition, rivalry, and the English mountains as a testing ground for character. Literary fiction set on rock.

Gretel Ehrlich's novel set in Wyoming during World War II, when a Japanese American internment camp was built in the shadow of the Absaroka Range. Landscape and injustice, cattle ranches and barbed wire. Ehrlich writes Wyoming the way nobody else can.

Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.

Scott O'Dell's children's novel about a girl stranded alone on an island off the California coast for eighteen years. Based on the true story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. Simple, devastating, and one of the books that made a generation of readers care about wildness.

Alison Fell's novel set against the backdrop of Alpine climbing — ambition, desire, and the Chamonix aiguilles. Literary fiction on ice.

There’s a vocal contingent of present-day adventurers who credit My Side of the Mountain with sparking a lifelong devotion to the outdoors. It’s the story of 12-year-old Sam Gribley, who runs away from home and builds a self-sufficient life in the wilds of the Catskill Mountains. He lives in a hollowed-out hemlock tree, captures and trains a falcon, makes pancakes out of acorns, and engages in other whimsical deeds that have captured the imaginations of generations of adventure-hungry kids.

Saint-Exupéry's novel about early airmail pilots flying over South America at night — when navigation meant reading the stars and the mountains were invisible until they killed you. Spare, tense, and luminous.

Kerouac's novel of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing and recrossing America is the foundational text of the Beat Generation. The road is the point — not the destination, not the arrival, just the movement itself.

“Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.” Like a sled dog nose down on the trail, Ordinary Wolves pulls you without hesitation into a life different from what most will ever know—sub-freezing “no-sun winters,” the smell of seal oil at dinner, worrying about whether a moose could crash through the ground-level skylight of your sod igloo. But this wild world is the only one young Cutuk Hawcly has ever known. Raised on the Alaskan tundra with his brother, sister, and idealistic father a day’s sled-drive from neighbors, Cutuk has grown up fishing, hunting, and everyday living on the remote Kuguruk River. He aspires to the on-the-land intuition of hunter Enuk Wolfglove, yet when 12-year-old Cutuk visits the closest village—with its snowmobiles and bright nylon jackets—the native kids choke him in a headlock because he is white and “hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners…” As Cutuk grows up, the Arctic old ways and the modern world clash over and over. Which path to follow? Ordinary Wolves is fiction, but author Seth Kantner is no tenderfoot. His parents moved to the northern Alaska wilderness in the 1950s and his dad apprenticed to an Iñupiaq couple in Arctic survival, decades earlier than today’s many reality show survivalists (and yes, even before Dick Proenneke got fish-hungry). Cutuk’s story is at times funny and other times brutally raw, inspired by real people and real emotions in a landscape often overly romanticized. It shines firelight on the true, unapologetic Last Frontier we’ve been seeking since Jack London was just a wolf pup. The book earned some moose-sized praise when first published, yet many don’t know Ordinary Wolves outside of the Northwest. It’s up for statewide Alaska Reads programming this year, and we’ve heard from friends who’ve read it six-plus times and counting. A tenth anniversary edition is now out—it’s howling to be rediscovered.

The first novel — airmail pilots over the Sahara and the Spanish coast, written from the cockpit. Romantic, dangerous, and suffused with the light of North Africa. The apprentice work that led to Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

Stay and Fight is land-loving, community-rooted fiction in the tradition of Wendell Berry, though with a little more guerrilla resistance and a lot more sex. Following her boyfriend’s notions of self-reliance, Seattle-raised Helen Conley buys twenty steep, densely wooded acres in Appalachia, but the boyfriend soon abandons her. To everyone’s surprise, Helen stays, inviting a local family, Karen and Lily and their baby boy, to move in and join forces. The resourceful local women butt heads with college-educated Helen and her Foxfire-like “Best Practices Binder”—“look for morels in the creek bed, oyster mushrooms smell like anise”—but together they build a ramshackle off-grid refuge. Years of hard labor, roadkill dinners, and isolation go by, but the outside world eventually comes knocking, then suddenly snarling. How far would you go to protect all that you hold dear? This is one fine rabble-rouser of a tale, as determined as the bite of a snapping turtle.

A surf noir novel set in Huntington Beach — murder, drugs, and waves. Dark, propulsive, and the best fictional treatment of Southern California surf culture ever written.

An otter's life in the rivers of Devon, told with a naturalist's precision and a novelist's sympathy. Published in 1927, it remains one of the finest animal narratives in English — unsentimental, ecologically exact, and devastating.

A thriller set on Everest — a climbing expedition unravels as the mountain reveals secrets buried in the ice. Genre fiction that takes the mountain seriously.

Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a lake, with loons and eagles and trout for neighbors. Together they pick blueberries, grow beets, and hunt and fish for food. The father teaches his daughter how to read the signs of nature, from the night sky to the painted turtle she keeps as a summer pet. Then one dark day, the girl discovers she’s all alone and far, far from home. The Bear has been a bookstore favorite from Miami to Santa Cruz and recently won a Banff Mountain Book Award. Some say it reads like a bedtime story, others feel it’s a post-apocalyptic parable, and I think it’s a little like oatmeal with peanut butter: simple yet satisfying, sticking with you long after you’re done.

London's novel about Buck, a domesticated dog stolen from California and thrown into the Yukon gold rush, where he gradually reverts to wildness. Written in 1903, it remains the most visceral exploration of the animal self buried inside domestication.

The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn't survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. The prose is as good as anything written in the twentieth century.

We’ve all imagined what it would be like to survive an apocalypse, but Peter Heller imagined it better. It’s nine years after a pandemic, our location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to his friends) lives in a compound with his beloved dog, Jasper, and a survivalist and arms aficionado named Bangley, who saw it all coming. Curmudgeonly Bangley is as happy as he’ll ever be, but Hig misses his wife and longs for contact. He hikes into the mountains to fish and he flies a small plane to look for signs of life. No good can come of this, argues Bangley, and events prove him right...or do they? Heller, who made his bones writing magazine stories, delivers a strangely optimistic and regenerative dystopian tale, one that might—might—satisfy even Bangley.

A literary thriller set in the Alps — two climbers on the Eiger Nordwand, decades of secrets, and a fall that echoes through time. Mawer writes climbing with the precision of someone who understands both the rock and the psychology.

Peter Heller’s previous novel, The River, moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will likely salve. It opens three years after The River, when Jack, a young Colorado rancher and guide, takes a last-minute gig at an ultra-exclusive fly-fishing lodge near Crested Butte. Spinning with grief, he’s hoping for healing, or at least distraction, but finds trouble the moment he drives up the narrow canyon. The property is bordered, his irritable manager warns, by one neighbor who shoots at interlopers and another whose dogs killed a trespassing angler. Heller, a fly fisherman himself, casts words as poetry, whether describing a backlit hatch, rigging a rod, or “the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain,” but it’s the mystery that hooks you. Why is there a hidden camera in Jack’s cabin thermostat? And why do you need a gate code to get out?

We first meet Nelson as a 13-year-old Boy Scout in the summer of 1962, his shirt and shorts squeaky clean, sash heavy with merit badges, bowlines impeccable. He strives to be loyal, brave, and kind—terms of the Scout Law. At Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Nelson’s the ideal citizen. But his overachieving doesn’t earn any friends until Jonathan, a popular scout, takes an unexpected interest in him. This panoramic coming-of-age novel strides across three American generations, from the echoes of World War I to today in Afghanistan, and from shattering tragedies to sweet first loves. There are times you want to look away from this book, and times you want to hold it close. Through it all, Camp Chippewa remains central, with its tidy tents and fields of lightning bugs. Can the moral compass of summer camp keep us oriented throughout our lives?

Paulsen's young adult novel about a boy alone on an island in a northern lake. Stripped down and elemental — survival as a form of attention.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a child from a tiny planet. The most-translated French book in history, and the most elegant fable ever written about what matters and what doesn't.

Four misfits wage war on development in the American Southwest — burning billboards, cutting fences, and plotting to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. Funny, profane, and dead serious about the land it loves. The book that launched environmental direct action.

Theroux's novel about an American inventor who drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia. It goes wrong in every possible way. A dark comedy about American arrogance in the tropics.

Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an experimental preserve where a small group of volunteers live nomadically as hunter-gatherers. The air is clean, the water runs clear, and the night sky sparkles. There’s also a Manual, capital M, a sort of Leave No Trace set of rules to keep the Wilderness State pristine, and Rangers for reinforcement. All effort is toward survival; when a person dies—from a cougar mauling, river crossing, or simply being left behind due to injury—there are no funerals. As years go by, the utopian vision oozes into disturbing desperation. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood will love this dark, all-too-real story of our relationship with nature and each other.

I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from 19th century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. What? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, knows how to build a fire. The Overstory has earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, thousands of impassioned reader reviews (both good and bad but mostly good), and, more important, the wholehearted love of the Lorax. In this novel (and in real life, too), the trees are as alive as the people—mulberries bleed, chestnuts groan, walnuts choke—and they create communities, transform the landscape, and talk nonstop: “We’d drown you in meaning” if only humans knew how to listen. Though massive as a redwood, Overstory’s tiniest moments whirl cinematically, like maple seeds spinning, searching for a spot to take root.

Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers—their shifting colors, sounds, and moods—like Heller. Now the Colorado author of the bestselling dystopian novel The Dog Stars merges his paddling experience with his mastery of suspenseful stories. The River tells of two earnest young men, college best friends from different backgrounds: Wynn, a Vermonter with a goofy smile who learned to canoe at summer camp, and Jack, a tough, skeptical rancher from the Rockies who grew up working outside. With fly rods and smoking pipes and a few good books, they’ve set off on a monthlong canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness, but the adventure takes an ominous turn from the start. Our one copy at Adventure Journal headquarters already has a long waitlist, so be ready to pass this gorgeously written thriller around.

A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.

London's novel about a literary critic shanghaied aboard a sealing schooner captained by Wolf Larsen — a Nietzschean brute who reads Herbert Spencer between beatings. The Pacific Ocean as a classroom in survival of the fittest.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier’s harsh demands. One day on a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet sure-footed as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a wily red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.

In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.

The adventure novel that invented the genre. A boy, a map, a one-legged pirate, and an island full of buried gold. Stevenson wrote it for children and created something that adults can't put down either.

During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To read Two Old Women is to stumble in the snowdrifts of Arctic Alaska, smell the sweet scent of birch woodsmoke, and fear the sharp twinges of starvation. Based on an oral Athabaskan legend, it’s a story rooted in Gwich’in culture, handed down to author Velma Wallis by her mother. And Wallis, who grew up in the six-hundred-fifty-person village of Fort Yukon, knows a thing or two about survival. As a teenager in the 1970s, she moved into her father’s remote trapping cabin, where she spent nearly a dozen years living off traditional subsistence skills. This short novel is a vital and classic tale, carrying embers from an ancient campfire onward into the night.

Delia Owens's novel about a girl growing up alone in the marshes of coastal North Carolina is a murder mystery wrapped in a naturalist's journal. The landscape — tidal flats, fireflies, oyster shells — is rendered with the precision of someone who has spent decades in the field.

Bass's novel about oil exploration in Montana — the search for ancient seas buried beneath the mountains. Dense, geological, and animated by the tension between extraction and preservation.

The inverse of The Call of the Wild — a wolf-dog hybrid moves from wilderness to domestication. London exploring the same territory from the other direction.