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Charles McCormac: You'll Die in Singapore: The True Account of One of the Most Amazing POW Escapes in WWII
Jolting account of Allied servicemen escaping from Singapore's horrific Pasir Panjang Japanese POW camp. A study in human suffering and determination. Excellent.

Giles Milton: White Gold
The terrible tale of the European slaves, kidnapped at sea by the infamous Barbary Corsairs and sold to Moulay Ismail, the inhuman first Sultan of Morocco.

Heinrich Harrer: Seven Years in Tibet (Paladin Books)
Latterly controversial because of his Nazi past, but still one of the greatest adventure stories ever written

Ben Macintyre: Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man Who Would Be King
The strange story of the American adventurer who apparently inspired Kipling's character "Daniel Dravot"

Robert Graves: Goodbye to all that
The harrowing autobiography of the young poet in WW1

Ekai Kawaguchi: Three Years In Tibet
Japanese Buddhist monk disguises himself and sneaks into the forbidden kingdom of Tibet at the turn of the 20th Century

George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London (Essential.penguin S.)
Brilliant and insightful read into the lives of the underclass

Mary S. Lovell: A Rage to Live
Recent Bio of the legendary explorer, with new material. Lady Burton gets a fairer treatment too, belatedly. A must

Fawn Brodie: The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton
The classic biography of the most extraordinary man of an extraordinary era

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
Conrad, the master of the exotic. Here he returns to a favourite theme: White man plays God with the natives and becomes undone. Unlike Kurtz, Jim is an innocent.

Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Geoffrey Firmin. A broken Englishman drinking himself to death in Mexico. Lowry's haunting yet elegiac tale has the most callously vivid final sentence of any book I've ever read.

Jack London: The Sea Wolf
Has there ever been in literature a character as monstrously magnificent as Wolf Larsen? London's raw and brutal adventure is an often shocking psychological study.

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
"The horror! The horror!" Conrad's bleak adventure tale lifts the false veneer of civilisation, exposing the savage heart of man underneath. The inspiration behind "Apocalypse Now", one of cinema's finest moments.

Wu Ch'eng-En: Monkey
We all remember the slapstick craziness of the 1970's "Monkey" TV series. The classic story of "Journey to the West" by Wu Ch'eng-en shows there's more depth to this quintessentially Chinese fable than one would at first imagine

James Hilton: Lost Horizon
The search for "Shangri-La". Hilton's classic adventure launched a thousand identically named hotels (none like the real thing of course), and quite a few regional Chinese tourist agency disputes. But does Shangri-La (Shambhala?) exist? If so, where can it be found?

Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums (Penguin Modern Classics)
"Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than a comfortable bed unfree" - so speaks the master chronicler of life on the road