Here are 100 books that 96 Miles fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
This is one of the scarier disaster novels I’ve read, targeted at young adults rather than middle-grade readers.
People die in frighteningly believable ways in this story about a severe water shortage in California. I live in a semi-arid region that has been experiencing more frequent droughts in the last few years, so this novel’s premise felt plausible: the taps are literally turned off.
As well, the various characters’ reactions to the crisis reflected people I know, from preppers to climate changer deniers to those who dig deep and find kindness no matter how bad things get.
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Dry
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What is this book about?
“The authors do not hold back.” —Booklist (starred review) “The palpable desperation that pervades the plot…feels true, giving it a chilling air of inevitability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The Shustermans challenge readers.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “No one does doom like Neal Shusterman.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman.
The drought—or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it—has been going on for a while…
As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape.
What are you made of, really? Who hasn’t conjured up a survival scenario in which you are the protagonist? How would you fare?
I loved this book because the author put you on that plane in that horribly inconceivable situation in which you simply know you will likely die. But you don’t—not immediately, anyway. But then the real struggle begins. This book resonates with me because every difficult, life-changing scenario is utterly plausible, unnerving, and interesting.
This award-winning contemporary classic is the survival story with which all others are compared—and a page-turning, heart-stopping adventure, recipient of the Newbery Honor. Hatchet has also been nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson, haunted by his secret knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, is traveling by single-engine plane to visit his father for the first time since the divorce. When the plane crashes, killing the pilot, the sole survivor is Brian. He is alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothing, a tattered windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother…
I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
In my search for a survival novel with a young female protagonist, I came across this gem set on a fictional island in the Pacific Northwest, close to where I live.
Thirteen-year-old Hannah is new to babysitting when disaster in the form of an earthquake strikes. I appreciated the way the protagonist constantly evaluates her situation, finding resilience and strength when there are no adults to turn to.
Hatchet meets The Babysitters Club in this epic and thrilling survival story about pushing oneself to the limit in the face of a crisis. We were all alone, in a shaken and shattered house, in the dark. And I was in charge. Hannah Steele loves living on Pelling, a tiny island near Seattle. She's always felt totally safe there. So when she's asked to babysit after school one day, it's no big deal. Zoe and Oscar are her next-door neighbors, and Hannah just took a babysitting class, which she's pretty sure makes her an expert. She isn't even worried that…
I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
When I was young, I read Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls. Published in 1961, it captured the love of nature and adventure that I experienced growing up. But as usual, the protagonist was a boy.
Echo Mountain has similar touchstones, but it is the book I wish I could have read when I was 13. The novel ticks all the survival story boxes for me: it features a feisty, independent girl hero, practical tips about wilderness survival, and realistic problems she must solve, sometimes defying cautious adult advice.
"Historical fiction at its finest." -The Horn Book
"There has never been a better time to read about healing, of both the body and the heart." -The New York Times Book Review
Echo Mountain is an acclaimed best book of 2020! An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Horn Book Fanfare Selection * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year * A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
After losing almost everything in the Great Depression, Ellie's…
Have you noticed the scarcity of YA novels told solely from a guy’s point of view? If you aren’t a boy, the parent of one, or maybe a savvy librarian, you probably haven’t. I’m two out of three. I have two awesome sons. They’re avid readers and burned through the YA section and into adult fantasy and sci-fi long before I was ready for them to. Boys read! There’s a need for protagonists who identify as male. No surprise, my YA novels often feature ordinary boys doing heroic things. Thanks to years of spying on my sons and their friends, I have plenty of fodder to feed my muse.
I avoid zombie fiction like the plague. Heh-heh. That level of horror just isn’t my thing. But I picked up Rot & Ruin curious about the two central characters, teen brothers Benny and Tom Imura. Wow! This book is much more than a plot-driven, gruesome-shock-around-every-corner horror story.
The Imura brothers set out together, despite mistrust and sibling rivalry, on a quest through a post-apocalyptic world swarming with the undead. I loved the interaction of love and obligation between them. Deadly trials ultimately forge their relationship into one of deep affection, trust, and loyalty. Nothing melts my heart like an unbreakable brother bond. Bonus, older brother Tom is a freakin’ cool fighter!
'This is anything but another zombie novel... exciting, full of action, and curiously thoughtful' Charlaine Harris, author of the True Blood series 'A thought-provoking thriller that still delivers a good dose of action and gore' The Bookseller
The perfect read for fans of The Walking Dead, from an award-winning author.
Nearly fourteen years ago, a freak virus swept across the world - turning those infected into the undead. Benny Imura has grown-up never knowing anything different; his last memory of his parents was of them becoming zombies. Now Benny is fifteen, and joining his brother Tom in the 'family business'…
I worked as an industrial electrician for over two decades. At one point during a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a question was posed about the delivery time of a specific piece of equipment. When the answer was given that it would be about a year away, it got me thinking: what if a specialized piece of equipment—critical to the grid and with an equally long lead time—was destroyed, how would the grid survive? More importantly; how would we survive? That single statement was the spark that ignited the fire in me to learn all about the grid, and to write Dark State.
I chose Outage by Ellisa Barr because it came from a unique viewpoint with regards to an attack that brings down an electrical grid; namely, a young person’s perspective. While other novels about grid attacks primarily have adults as a protagonist, Outage tackles the topic from a younger person’s frame of reference, along with all the unique adolescent problems that come with it.
And while the temptation would be for the main character, an adolescent girl, to become a courageous and seasoned adult overnight, the author wisely takes her time and sets us on a journey of a slower evolution. While not containing any revelatory information about what elements of a society beset with no electricity would have to endure, I still liked this book as it reminded me to not always see things from my adult perspective.
When fifteen-year-old Dee is left at her grandpa's farm in rural Washington, she thinks her life is over. She may be right.
An electromagnetic-pulse attack has destroyed the country's power grid, sending the United States back to the Dark Ages. Now Dee and Grandpa must face a world without electricity and clean water-let alone cell phones and the Internet-as well as the chaos brought on by this sudden catastrophe. Soon their town begins to collapse as disease and lawlessness run rampant. With handsome, troubled Mason and friendly boy-next-door Hyrum at her side, Dee fights to survive and deals with a…
I was born in the world’s most isolated capital city – Perth, Western Australia. Ever since my family packed up and drove across the vast Nullarbor Plain to relocate to South Australia, I’ve been fascinated by our eerie, wide-open spaces. There’s no doubt that family folklore fed into this. My Finnish mother arrived as a ten-year-old, recalling that when she first felt the heat, she thought: “This is hell.” My father and his family arrived from the Netherlands. I love my country, but this continent presents dangers in its arid isolation – all captivating to a storyteller.
The Island achieved an incredible feat by inducing two competing thoughts in my mind: this couldn’t possibly happen, and this could possibly happen!
A family of four is on an Australian driving holiday and is unexpectedly allowed entry onto a privately owned Dutch Island. This isolated setting soon makes them vulnerable and reliant on others. I loved following the characters’ journeys as they grappled with how to protect themselves and their loved ones. They’re "ordinary everyday people" who are forced to take action—and there’s plenty of it!
As with most of the best thrillers, there are multiple points of view that ratchet up the tension.
I've always been fascinated by the toughest survivors, the ones where I say to myself, “I could have never got through that.” Then I’m curious about how they endured: what mindsets and techniques did they use to fight on? When I became a writer I focused on this niche, with my first book Ten Hours Until Dawn which was followed by several other true survival and rescue tales. I became obsessed with researching where the survivors made the correct decisions and how they got trapped by bad ones. When my book The Finest Hours became a Disney movie I was deluged with people sharing their own survival stories.
When sharks are circling your life raft, I do not recommend drinking seawater to quench your excruciating thirst. In Albatross, five people find themselves adrift at sea in a small life raft with no food or water. When one of the sailors drinks seawater we see how that can dehydrate the brain and cause hallucinations. Suddenly the sailor blurts out that he is going to get his car to get some beer, and he steps out of the life raft. The sharks are waiting.
Albatross is not only a story of mistakes made, but also of courageous decisions by two survivors, Deb Kiley and Brad Cavanaugh. It is hair-raising, insightful, and might just keep you off the water.
In 1982 the author and four companions got caught in a storm in a 58 foot yacht off the coast of North Carolina. For five days they kept alive without food or water in a tiny inflatable dinghy after the yacht sank. The first night was spent in the water under the upside down dinghy trying to keep warm, not learning until morning that the area was infested with sharks. Two of the boys drank sea water, went mad, climbed overboard and were never seen again. Meg, badly injured, died of exposure and gangrene. Brad and Debbie were rescued by…
I spent more than 10 years and 25,000 nautical miles voyaging as the captain of my sailboat, Swell. My desires for life did not fit the common mold and context of where I grew up in Southern California– I sailed away wanting to understand the meaning of life, live simply and closer to nature, experience and learn from other cultures, be in solitude and ask life’s bigger questions. I chased my big, unlikely ocean dream and succeeded, but not without radical challenges, learning, and growth.
Steven Callahan not only survived this harrowing sea adventure but also wrote about it in such a powerful way. His unique descriptions constantly made me smile. I love how he was able to capture his evolving relationship with the ocean, his spirituality, himself, and the creatures he encounters during the 76-day saga of being adrift in a life raft on the Atlantic after his sailboat sunk.
I didn’t want to put this book down, he was just so courageous not to give up. It was fascinating to be in his head through this radical journey, especially as he questions the meaning of life while fighting to hang on to his own.
Before The Perfect Storm, before In the Heart of the Sea, Steven Callahan’s dramatic tale of survival at sea was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than thirty-six weeks. In some ways the model for the new wave of adventure books, Adrift is an undeniable seafaring classic, a riveting firsthand account by the only man known to have survived more than a month alone at sea, fighting for his life in an inflatable raft after his small sloop capsized only six days out. “Utterly absorbing” (Newsweek), Adrift is a must-have for any adventure library.
When I was eleven, I picked up a book about a girl and a boy who get lost on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada. It’s the first book I can remember reading over and over and over again. I wanted to be in that tent and in that forest figuring out how to survive. Since then, I’ve been hooked on books about people facing grueling physical challenges, surviving in the wilderness, and finding out what they’re made of. They’re urgent and compelling and the stakes are high, and I’ll never stop loving the thrill of reading about people being pushed to their physical and mental limits.
This book is tense! Jess is alone in the Canadian wilderness, still injured from the car accident that killed her mom, and now her dad has been murdered and his cabin burned down. Jess must figure out how to survive in the cold with no shelter and no way out when nobody knows where she is. This is part survival story and part thriller. Jess is driven by her desire to survive as much as her desire for revenge. The survival aspect here is enough to keep you reading, but I also loved trying to piece together the mystery of why her dad was killed.
Jess is stranded in the woods. She has few supplies and only her dog for company. Her survival skills are limited, and she has disabilities that make physical labor a challenge. And winter is on its way. How did she get here?
Alternating between the past and the present, this tightly-paced novel tells the story of a girl who survived a car crash that killed her mother, then was pulled from foster care and sent to live with her estranged survivalist father in the remote Canadian wilderness. Jess was just beginning to get to know her dad when a secret…
