Here are 100 books that Adrift fans have personally recommended if you like
Adrift.
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I have always loved science and luckily had inspirational teachers at school and university. I ended up being a professor of molecular biology, but animal behavior has always fascinated me. Watching a total eclipse of the sun near my parents’ house in Cornwall when horses started to behave unusually before the darkness fell piqued my interest in writing my book. Did they know it was coming? Reading about Dolbear’s Law using crickets to measure the air temperature led me to ask what was going on. The more reading I did, the more amazing stories became revealed, and it seemed timely to put this passion into a book.
I loved this book as it tells an incredible story of the fight against the environment. Even though I knew how the adventure ended, I was still gripped, wondering what happened and how the people involved fought for their survival.
Understanding the “land” on which they found themselves and watching some of the animal behavior was key to their perseverance, even after they lost their ship. Although this is a true story, I still found it hard to believe that it really happened, and Lansing’s writing really brings the hardship they suffered and their bravery alive.
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed between two ice floes. With no options left, Shackleton and a skeleton crew attempted a near-impossible…
I’m a crime and horror author based in New York City. I’ve lived through a couple of direct hits from mega-storms and other natural disasters, including Hurricane Sandy, which plowed through my neighborhood in 2012. Those kinds of experiences leave a psychological mark I’ve tried to process through both fiction and non-fiction. This writing has also allowed me to explore how people and cities could potentially survive the calamities that await us, especially in coastal regions vulnerable to climate change.
This is one of the nonfiction books I read as a teenager that convinced me to become a professional writer. The author, Sebastian Junger, doesn’t just describe the titular storm (which hit the U.S. East Coast in 1991) in terrifying detail—he also manages to assemble all of the weather-driven chaos into a real, gripping narrative. We don’t know a lot about what actually happened to the Andrea Gail, the fishing boat at the center of the narrative, but Junger recreates its final hours in a way that feels bracingly real—and heartbreaking.
Even if you don’t like nonfiction books, The Perfect Storm has the pacing and heart of a novel. I consider it one of the finest—maybe the finest—disaster narrative ever written, and it’s a perfect choice of book if you’re trapped inside by a raging storm.
It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high-a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we've been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control.
Winner of the American Library Association's 1998 Alex…
I grew up on the tip of a peninsula jutting out into the raging Atlantic ocean. Both of my grandfathers spent their lives at sea. The power, and fear, that the ocean inspires has been a constant in my life, and most recently while working on Acadian Driftwood. Spending years working on a story so closely tied to tragedy, and the sea, I’ve consumed a lot of nautical disaster stories. While not everything on the list is a disaster (Nansen got his ship stuck in the ice on purpose) each story will make you rethink whether you ever want to head out to sea.
A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick,In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew.
The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century - and inspiration for `Moby-Dick' - reissued to accompany a major motion picture due for release in December 2015, directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy.
When the whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819, the unthinkable happened. A mere speck in the vast Pacific ocean - and powerless against the forces of nature - Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale, and her twenty crewmen were forced to take to the open sea…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
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.
This is the book that sparked my desire to see the world by sailboat and made me believe that I could chase my big ocean adventure dreams.
I love the authenticity of Robin’s storytelling and his courage to brave the ocean despite being so young and inexperienced. I related to his curiosity for the world, his desire for true love, and his voyage as a rite of passage in the modern age. I definitely had a crush on him by the end of the book, and I sure wished his companion Patty had written a book too!
2
authors picked
Dove
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12,
13,
14, and
15.
What is this book about?
In 1965, 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham began a solo around-the-world voyage from San Pedro, California, in a 24-foot sloop. Five years and 33,000 miles later, he returned to home port with a wife and daughter and enough extraordinary experiences to fill this bestselling book, Dove.
I grew up on the tip of a peninsula jutting out into the raging Atlantic ocean. Both of my grandfathers spent their lives at sea. The power, and fear, that the ocean inspires has been a constant in my life, and most recently while working on Acadian Driftwood. Spending years working on a story so closely tied to tragedy, and the sea, I’ve consumed a lot of nautical disaster stories. While not everything on the list is a disaster (Nansen got his ship stuck in the ice on purpose) each story will make you rethink whether you ever want to head out to sea.
Years before Shackleton and his crew became locked in the ice in Antarctica, Fridtjof Nansen his crew, and more than one hundred dogs got their ship stuck at the opposite end of the earth. But they did it on purpose. Before the modern understanding of oceanic currents, Nansen proposed that if he let his ship become locked in the polar ice, he and his crew would drift, very slowly, all the way to the North Pole. Three years later he and one other emerged shipless, frozen, and covered in walrus skin on a rocky island above the arctic circle. His ship? Safely on its way back to Norway. What happened in-between is almost unbelievable.
"If Outside magazine had been around during the first turn of the century, Fridtjof Nansen would have been its No. 1 cover boy." The Chicago Sun-Times In September of 1893, Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen and crew manned the schooner Fram, intending to drift, frozen in the Arctic pack-ice, to the North Pole. When it became clear that they would miss the pole, Nansen and companion Hjalmar Johansen struck off by themselves. Racing the shrinking pack-ice, they attempted, by dog-sled, to go "farthest north." They survived a winter in a moss hut eating walruses and polar bears, and the public assumed…
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.
I love love loved learning the story of the resurrection of traditional Polynesian navigation in this book.
Sam Low does such an incredible job bringing together all the elements of the story, and made me feel like I was right there experiencing every challenge, every victory toward more understanding, every gust of wind, every windfall.
I loved how he developed each character involved, and I felt especially close to Nainoa Thompson through the journey and was moved by his dedication to uncovering this nearly lost art of navigating by the sun, stars, and signs from the sea.
Attuned to a world of natural signs-the stars, the winds, the curl of ocean swells-Polynesian explorers navigated for thousands of miles without charts or instruments. They sailed against prevailing winds and currents aboard powerful double canoes to settle the vast Pacific Ocean. And they did this when Greek mariners still hugged the coast of an inland sea, and Europe was populated by stone-age farmers. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, this story had been lost and Polynesians had become an oppressed minority in their own land. Then, in 1975, a replica of an ancient Hawaiian canoe-Hokule'a-was launched to…
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
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.
I absolutely love the way that Bernard writes about the ocean. The way he describes how it feels, his relationship to the sea, his boat, time and space out there. It’s almost like a meditation. I felt so many similar feelings on my own voyage.
I loved how he disregarded social norms to follow his heart and do what made him happy. He helped validate my need to live on my own terms and explore the purpose of life through my own ocean adventures.
The Long Way is Bernard Moitessier's own incredible story of his participation in the first Golden Globe Race, a solo, non-stop circumnavigation rounding the three great Capes of Good Hope, Leeuwin, and the Horn. For seven months, the veteran seafarer battled storms, doldrums, gear-failures, knock-downs, as well as overwhelming fatigue and loneliness. Then, nearing the finish, Moitessier pulled out of the race and sailed on for another three months before ending his 37,455-mile journey in Tahiti. Not once had he touched land.
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.
I love how candidly Audrey brings us along on her incredible adventures swimming and paddling the coast of Molokai. It felt like I had acquired a new best friend after reading this book. It’s rare to read stories by women whose desire to experience solitude in nature and “get away from it all” outweighs the fear of all the unknowns that the ocean and nature can present.
I loved her life principles, both as a mother and a human being, and coming along with her on these summertime adventures was pure joy with every page.
In 1958, while flying from one island to another, Audrey Sutherland sees the remote and roadless northeast side of Molokai, with its spectacular sea cliffs and waterfalls. Always an adventurer, she decides that she must find a way to explore this then inaccessible area. After much study, she determines that the best way for her to navigate these treacherous sea walls is to swim while towing an inflatable kayak. This is the story of fulfilling her dream, of planning then implementing, of launching and advancing, of retreating and reconnoitering, of challenge and success. This…
A longtime student of history, particularly WW2 and the Cold War, my interest was personally piqued when I started to discover more about how my husband’s family narrowly escaped capture by the Gestapo – and certain death in a concentration camp. I’m driven to write novels set in this era for middle grade kids – featuring brave young heroes faced with moral dilemmas– so they can learn about the horrors of antisemitism, tyrants, and war because “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
A page-turning, true-life adventure! The story is told in first-person verse by 13-year-old Ken Sparks whose parents send him from England to Canada at the start of the Blitz as part of the British government’s ill-fated child evacuee program. Five days into the crossing, his ship, the SS Benares, is torpedoed by a German U-Boat, and as it sinks fast, Ken finds himself in a lifeboat with five other boys fighting for their lives. I read this book and loved it from page one. Although they come from very different backgrounds, Ken and Käfer share endearing qualities: pluck, resourcefulness, and a child’s optimistic view of the world. All of which stand them in good stead.
"This page-turning true-life adventure is filled with rich and riveting details and a timeless understanding of the things that matter most."-Dashka Slater, author of The 57 Bus "Brilliantly told in verse, readers will love Ken Sparks." -Patricia Reilly Giff, two-time Newbery Honor winner "Lyrical, terrifying, and even at times funny. A richly detailed account of a little-known event in World War II." -Kirkus Reviews "Middle grade Titanic fans, here's your next read." -BCCB "An edge-of-your seat survival tale." -School Library Journal (starred review)
A Junior Library Guild Selection The 2019 Golden Kite Middle Grade Fiction Award Winner A 2019 ALSC…
At the age of forty-nine, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and leaves her life in upstate New York to relocate to Seoul, South Korea. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English in Asia evolves into a nomadic adventure.
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…
