Ah, the lure of the open road, or the open water, or simply the great unknown. Adventure fiction can be even more powerful than nonfiction (the best of which is plenty powerfully exciting) because novelists who tackle the genre have far more latitude than writers describing an actual event.

Although coming-of-age novels like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped could rightly be considered adventure novels, as could many thrillers, I’m limiting this list to accounts of man (and/or woman) against nature.

Based on an actual event, Lisa Michaels’s haunting Grand Ambition is the story of a honeymooning couple whose decision to raft down the Colorado River in 1928 ends in disaster.

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The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge relates the exhilarating and poignant last days of the doomed 1912 Robert Falcon Scott–led Antarctic expedition that ended in the deaths of all five members of the group.

Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition in 1914 is the subject of Melinda Mueller’s What the Ice Gets—an epic poem told in the varied voices of members of Shackleton’s crew and Shackleton himself.

An assignment to photograph bears in the Arctic wilderness turns into a struggle for survival for Beryl, the heroine of The Cage, by Audrey Schulman.

Two teenage adventure novels that make good reading for adults, too, are James Ramsey Ullman’s long-out-of-print Banner in the Sky, in which a young Swiss boy is determined to climb the mountain on which his father died, and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, a multi-award-winning story about a teenager surviving alone in the wilderness after an airplane crash.