What to read after “Erebus: The Story of a Ship” by Michael Palin: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
In 1879 the USS Jeannette sails for the Arctic, chasing a theory about a warm open sea at the pole. Trapped and then crushed by the ice, the crew abandon ship and begin a desperate march across the pack toward Siberia.
In 1845 two Royal Navy ships sail to find the Northwest Passage and vanish into the Arctic ice. As the crews endure cold, scurvy and starvation, they are stalked across the frozen waste by a creature that should not exist.
In 1921, an Iñupiat seamstress joins a Canadian expedition to Wrangel Island as a cook. When the men leave or die, she is left alone on the island for months, learning to hunt and survive while waiting for a rescue that may never come.
In 1859, a disgraced Irish surgeon signs on as doctor of a whaling ship bound for the Arctic. Among the crew is a brutal harpooner with his own plans, and as the voyage turns from routine to disaster, the two men are set on a collision course.
Virginia Reeve is hired to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of a lost expedition. When only some of them come back, she is tried for murder in Boston. The courtroom testimony and the journey north slowly reveal what happened out on the ice.
The Viking Red Orm sails from his Scandinavian home in the late tenth century and is carried through raids, courts and distant seas, from Andalusia to the Byzantine guard. A picaresque saga of raids, treasure and shifting faith, told with dry humour and a wide view of the Viking world.
In 1914 Ernest Shackleton sets out to cross Antarctica; in 1915 his ship is crushed by the ice and the crew is left stranded. This account follows their months on drifting floes and the desperate open-boat journey he makes to seek rescue.
In 1800, Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey takes command of a small brig and meets the ship's surgeon, Stephen Maturin, a naturalist and secret intelligence agent. Their friendship grows as the crew pursues a Spanish frigate across the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Three men are taken aboard the Nautilus, a submarine commanded by the brilliant Captain Nemo, after it attacks their ship. As they travel the ocean depths they witness wonders and terrors of the undersea world while their host's motives stay hidden.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
In 1740 a British warship hunting a Spanish treasure galleon is wrecked off Patagonia. Months later two groups of survivors reach South America with opposing stories, and a court martial must decide which men were heroes and which were mutineers.
Smilla, a Greenlander living in Copenhagen, trusts the snow. When a neighbour's young son falls from a roof, the tracks tell her it was no accident, and her search leads from the city to an icebreaker bound for a remote Greenland island.
Young Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map in a dead sailor's chest and sails for a distant island where a pirate's gold is buried. Among the crew is the one-legged cook Long John Silver, whose charm hides a plan to seize the hoard.
Shipwrecked alone on a deserted island, a castaway named Robinson Crusoe builds a life from nothing: shelter, crops and a canoe. Years of solitude end when he finds a footprint in the sand and rescues a man he names Friday.
A human expedition reaches Mesklin, a world where gravity varies wildly and the natives are intelligent, centipede-like traders. When the expedition's rocket is stranded at the pole, a human scientist must trust a Mesklinite captain to cross a brutal landscape and recover it.
Lira is a siren who takes the heart of a prince each year. When she is punished and turned human, the only way back is to deliver the heart of Prince Elian, a siren hunter who has no idea who she really is. Their journey across the sea turns enemies into something neither of them planned.
Four young refugees cross a frozen East Prussia in the winter of 1945, each hiding a secret and hoping to reach a ship that will carry them west. Their paths merge among the crowds fleeing the advancing Soviet army, bound for a vessel whose fate none of them suspect.
A wandering sailor joins the whaling ship Pequod, whose captain is obsessed with hunting the white whale that took his leg. As the voyage stretches across the oceans, the crew is dragged toward a reckoning. A vast, digressive novel of obsession, the sea and human nature.
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
A literary critic survives a ferry collision in San Francisco Bay and is picked up by a sealing schooner commanded by Wolf Larsen, a brutal and brilliant captain. Thrown into the crew's rough life, the soft scholar must find his footing under a man who answers to no law but his own.
Tress lives on an island where the seas are made of deadly spores. When the man she loves is taken by the Sorceress, she leaves her ordinary life, gathers an unlikely crew and sails toward the midnight sea to bring him home.
Five Union prisoners escape a siege in a hot-air balloon and are blown onto an uncharted island. There they rebuild a small civilization from its resources, aided by an unseen hand and threatened by a hidden danger.
Heartsick and desperate to return home to America, Georgina Anderson disguises herself as a cabin boy to board the Maiden Anne. The ship belongs to James Malory, a wealthy former pirate and unrepentant rake who sees through her disguise. Aboard his vessel, their sparring gives way to an attraction neither can easily dismiss.
In 1937, a young London clerk joins a year-long expedition to a remote bay in Svalbard. As the polar night closes in and his companions leave one by one, he stays alone with the radio, the cold, and a presence that seems to be waiting in the abandoned camp.
What should I read after “Erebus: The Story of a Ship”?
Start with “In the Kingdom of Ice”, “The Terror”, “Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic”: they are the closest to “Erebus: The Story of a Ship” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Erebus: The Story of a Ship” these are Arctic, Nautical Adventure, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “In the Kingdom of Ice”, “The Terror”, “Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
