The best adventure audiobooks of all time

A great adventure story keeps you listening for the next turn of the road. We chose these books because they still do that a century or more later. The list opens with the founders of the form: Defoe's castaway, Dumas's musketeers and his wronged sailor turned count, and Stevenson's two boys in over their heads, one with a treasure map and one kidnapped onto a ship bound for the Carolinas. Then come the sea stories, from Melville's whaler and Kipling's Grand Banks fishing schooner to Jack London's brutal sealing captain and Conrad's disgraced young officer.

The middle of the list goes looking for the edges of the map. Verne sends a Nautilus under the oceans, Phileas Fogg around the globe on a bet, and a courier across Siberia. Haggard's hunters search for a lost mine, Doyle's Professor Challenger finds a plateau that time skipped over, and Burroughs raises a boy in the African jungle. Kipling's Kim and Twain's Huck Finn add two of the best boy heroes in the language.

We close with swashbucklers and spies: Captain Blood, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Mark of Zorro, and two early spy thrillers, The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps, that taught the spy novel its tricks. Most of these were written as serials, so chapters end on hooks and suit a commute or a long drive.