The best books describing real, epic journeys of survival

Charriere’s story of his escape from a penal colony in French Guiana in 1931, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, is utterly engrossing. The reader quickly becomes immersed in a fantastical world of survival, betrayal, luck, and daring, as the author – nicknamed ‘Papillon’ as a result of the butterfly tattoo on his chest – describes his exploits in the darkest depths of prison, the untamed jungles of South America and the unforgiving tropical seas. The knowledge that Charriere himself later said that the book was “only 75% true” and an amalgam of his story with those of other inmates he knew and met, does nothing to diminish the book's impact and unrelenting entertainment value.

When I was researching my grandfather’s actions fighting for Czechoslovakia in World War Two, for my own book, including his time of the front line in France in 1940, I grew tired of academic history books and sought out a firsthand account of the realities of combat. Guy Sajer’s story of his experiences as a German soldier on the Eastern Front provided exactly what I was looking for: As I read it, I could feel the mud caked on my fingers, the shrapnel wound stinging my arm, and the trench foot creeping up my leg. The fact that Sajer was fighting, somewhat unwillingly, with the Nazis gives a whole extra layer of interest too.

Frantisek Moravec was the Head of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence before and during the Second World War, when he was also my grandfather’s boss. When I found out that Morovec had written a memoir, after escaping from Czechoslovakia in 1948, I scoured the internet to find it. I really didn’t expect the book to be the masterpiece that it is. Moravec recounts with fine detail, how he and his team continually used their wits and guile to stay ahead of both the Nazis and the Communists and maintain Czechoslovakia’s existence, right up until the Iron Curtain eventually descended. In particular he recounts how he oversaw Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of the infamous Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, who had been the architect of the Final Solution. This is a book that really demands fresh attention.  

As I was nearing the end of the research for my book, I was desperately trying to decide on a narrative approach that would allow me to tell the full story I had uncovered. I found the inspiration in an unexpected place as I read The Lost City of Z on my kindle by a swimming pool on vacation. Grann’s book tells the story of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared with his son in the Amazon in 1925, on an obsessive hunt for the ancient lost city of the title. Grann’s approach was to retrace Fawcett’s steps, and tell the story of his own quest alongside that of the explorer – flipping between narratives as he progressed. This narrative trick brought the distant, tragic story into the tangible present, making it far more engaging, contemporary, and real. 

Slawomir Rawicz was a Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by Russian intelligence agents after the German invasion of Poland in 1941. His book describes how he and six others escaped from the Siberian Gulag and travelled on foot through the Gobi Desert to Tibet, the Himalayas, and India. Much like Henri Charriere’s Papillon, Rawicz’s story is so fantastical that many have questioned its veracity. But the book still appealed to me as, the more I have read such stories the more I have understood that the truth really is stranger than fiction, and often they faithfully convey an experience, even if memory has clouded the detail of specific incidents.