The most recommended wilderness survival books

I’m always up for a page-turning thriller that’s set in the outdoors, and The River at Night kept me awake late and eager for more. This story follows four women who decide to jazz up their annual girls’ trip by whitewater rafting in the Maine wilderness. What could go wrong? Just about everything. When a freak accident leaves them stranded, they’re eager for help. But are their rescuers the saviors they first believe? Grab this book for an energizing read you won’t soon forget.  

Marc Cameron has a way of intertwining the specific details of law enforcement—gained from personal experience—with compelling, exciting, page-turning, nail-biting stories featuring Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter. Cutter’s assignment in Alaska finds him fighting crime in harsh and forbidding environments.

In Cold Snap, the hunt for a serial killer in Anchorage and a doomed prison transport from the far north prove connected as Cutter is stranded in a frozen wilderness with violent and murderous convicts, complicated by marauding wolves and bears. Besides all that, a storm rolls in that’s so cold and violent it can freeze your fingers to the pages.

I write and tend to read stories about contemporary relationships. Lauren Groff has recently written a fiction set long ago about women who face extraordinary challenges, in this case, the survival of a runaway servant, c 1609.

It is a literary action adventure of a sort with profound meaning. She grounds her stories in the landscape, while I ground mine in the culture.

I love the contrast. She inspires me. Her descriptive prose is spectacular in detail, and I was swept along, spellbound, on this arduous journey as if I were there, rooting for the runaway, even knowing the odds were against her.

No one writes like Groff – every word is a knockout – and reading her fiction, for me, is a master class. 

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. 

Charlotte Drummond is a sort of anti-Carrie Simpson: same era, but fictional and feminist, living on the lower Columbia River. She joins a search for a girl lost from a remote logging camp and discovers more than she bargained for. There’s so much to love in this quiet novel, mainly the vivid and unflashy rendering of landscape and unfolding of memorable characters.

And, bigfoot. 

Most books about the military are written by men. But I was fascinated by this practical tip-based book by journalist Rosie Garthwaite. Wonderful anecdotes amongst real gems for staying safe in dangerous places. I also used it as research for one of my novels about a female war correspondent in Afghanistan.

Gatty was a remarkable, pioneering aviator from Tasmania and the first person to bring the art of natural navigation to a wide audience. During the Second World War, he taught navigation to US military airmen, and wrote a guide to survival at sea that was standard issue and probably saved quite a few lives: The Raft Book. Finding Your Way (which first came out in the 1950s under the title Nature Is Your Guide), builds on that earlier work and is a mine of fascinating information and anecdotes on which I drew extensively in writing Incredible Journeys.

Gatty was a real expert and discusses how all our senses can help us find our way, even in very difficult circumstances. For example, he tells of an Inuit hunter who, paddling his kayak in thick fog, was able to find the entrance of his home fjord by listening out for… show more.

The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing is a compelling parable about forgiveness while evoking both the dangers and the beauty of nature and faraway places.

The author, Joseph Fasano, is an acclaimed poet whose prose rings like poetry—stunning and poignant. Much of the story takes place in remote places, places I have always loved and longed for, and destinations where one can retreat from the world.

These places are sometimes called “thin places,” places writer Mark D. Roberts described as “where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin, a place where we can sense the divine more readily.”

When I was growing up, the Pennsylvania forest was near, and I loved walking alone in it with my dog, sometimes disappearing for hours, worrying my mother. Fasano’s novel reminded me in many ways of those times when I longed to lose the world for a while. And at… show more.

Any Peter Heller novel will work here—The Dog Stars, The Painter, etc.—but The River is really interesting for a few reasons: Heller pushes his characters into the unknown on a river that serves both as a literal symbol and a propulsive, metaphorical symbol. There’s no way to backtrack on a river, so his two friends can’t go backwards. Then we add in the imminent danger of a forest fire and the creepy people also on the river with them, and the whole entire mix is scary!

A non-fiction account of one office worker’s yearlong attempt to survive in Alaska. As someone who finds non-fiction quite dry and hard to read, this book is the best of both worlds. It has the detail of a true account with the wit and humor of fictional story. This book gives me something that former SAS professionals and hardened explorers cannot; the experiences of an everyday man, trading his desk job for a log cabin in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. 

Two decades ago, I was preparing for my first book promotion trip to Australia and New Zealand. I asked my (Aussie) publisher to recommend two books to learn more about Australia and its history.

The first was In A Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, which I had heard of. The second was Cooper’s Creek, which I hadn’t. It’s a stunning, scary, edge-of-your-seat short history about an expedition in 1860 that set out from Melbourne into the vast, empty, broiling interior of the country, with the mission to find a route to the lush northern coast. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned.

The book is taken from first-hand accounts by the explorers, and is novel-like in its dramatic twists and turns. 

This book was a surprise hit for me. I’d never read Martin before, but my husband knew I appreciated adventure stories. What I got instead, was a little bit of everything. Adventure, romance, excitement, and more—The Mountain Between Us was unputdownable for me. I think, though, that its dangerous, snowy setting was the one thing that upped the stakes the most. When reading this book, I felt trapped in the snowy mountains, myself. I felt cold and hungry, thirsty, and…totally swept away. 

This story of a 12-year-old boy who runs away from his New York City home to live alone in the Catskills is a comfort read in my house.

The detailed description of how Sam survives—foraging, building traps, hollowing out a tree—and the theme of independence are catnip to the introverts in my family. The book is read on repeat with my boys.

I picked this memoir up in Glasgow’s International Airport, desperate for something to read on the long flight back to Denver. The title is what drew me. It, too, promised a road trip of a different sort: A walking-the-path story. I started reading while waiting for my flight and was immediately engaged.

Past middle-aged, homeless hikers, this Welsh couple, husband and wife, strikeout to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset. The husband has been recently diagnosed with an incurable disease. They have lost their home and farm, and they decide to set out walking. Because why not? Life is moving forward, one step at a time.

I loved this story because the author writes from experience. She’s not a journalist pretending to be homeless; she is homeless. She writes frankly but with an ear for words. At times, she seems impulsive and naïve – as… show more.

An oldie but goodie - many of the techniques described are still applicable in modern times. Beard includes lengthy descriptions and illustrations of building all kinds of small shelters, including cabins, treehouses & towers. He helped start the Boy Scouts of America and was an avid woodsman, illustrator, and conservationist. His tips on outdoor living are invaluable – including two chapters on how to use an ax. 

This book takes readers into the swamps of Florida where wild things eat people. I’m a huge fan of Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, and John D. McDonald, all of whom write (or wrote in the case of McDonald) about south Florida. So it’s great to find a YA book for boys set in the Everglades. Like with most of Tim’s books, the characters push the boundaries of what they know to be right, but do not cross the line. Boys take chances. Or at least the boys I grew up with did. We explore the outdoors, go it alone, test things, break things, and often get trapped in situations of our own making. Escape from the Everglades allows me to enjoy being a kid again without, you know, getting gobbled by a gator.

This to me is the encyclopedia of wilderness survival.

It features content from various books and authors related to survival and wilderness living, and it’s a very good reference book due to the vastness of the topics covered.

The first time I browsed it I was immediately surprised by how comprehensive it was. I feel that this book complements very well the other books on my list. The fact that it contains sections from multiple authors means you get a diverse and well-rounded perspective of the many skills and techniques covered.

This book also has some long-term, expedition, and bushcraft angles, rather than a strictly survival approach.

Gonzales has a way of providing information in a compelling manner, managing to use stories to present ideas rather than approaching them clinically. Deep Survival is a fascinating look at how people interact with the world as influenced by their unique and our shared human psychology and experiences. This book provides insight, but also inspiration to pay more attention and learn from our own experiences, creating a mental foundation for further exploration and growth. 

This book contains the topics you would expect inside a survival manual, such as navigation, fire, shelter, food, water, and so on.

What I really like about it are the colourful, realistic illustrations, and the easily digestible layout of the information. It covers a very wide range of topics related to wilderness survival and overall it provides a well-balanced approach. It comes in multiple editions and some formats are more suitable as field books than others.

It is a solid book that I would recommend to anyone wanting a classic-style survival manual to use as reference at home or in the field.

Sometimes a book ends too soon for a reader, or in a way that doesn’t sit right. When that happened to author, Gary Paulsen, he did something about it. He extended the original Hatchet tale in a new book, Brian’s Winter, as if Brian didn’t make it out in autumn and had to winter over. 

If you haven’t read Hatchet, you’re missing a wilderness treat. A real adventure, making you feel like Brian, crash-landed in northern Canada, utterly on your own with one tool. Reading the book, I admit shivering, holding my breath, feeling my hopes rise and fall with his... really not wanting to stop reading and go do my chores.

He survives with some luck, and with guts and brains. I like feeling I could be that guy.