After her father is shot dead in 1870s Arkansas, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed U.S. marshal with a taste for whiskey, to hunt the killer into Indian Territory. A Texas Ranger joins them, and the three ride into a hard country where justice is personal.
In 1870 Texas, an ageing widower who reads newspapers aloud to frontier audiences agrees to carry a ten-year-old girl south to her relatives. She was taken by Kiowa years earlier and has forgotten English, and the long journey is dangerous for them both.
Two former Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, leading a ragged crew across rivers, drought and hostile country. The long journey tests the old friendship of the two men and the loyalties of everyone who follows them.
William Andrews leaves Harvard for a frontier town in Kansas, hoping to see the West for himself. He joins an old buffalo hunter on an expedition into Colorado, where the work becomes a brutal test of endurance and the hunters' ambitions strip the land bare.
Frontiersman Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions, who take his rifle and supplies. He crawls out of the wilderness and sets out on a long journey to find the men who abandoned him.
A quiet stranger rides into a Wyoming valley and hires on with homesteaders Joe and Marian Starrett. The boy Bob idolises him, but Shane's skill with a gun pulls him back toward a past he wants to leave when a cattle baron moves against the settlers.
Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired killers riding to California to find a prospector. As the brothers travel, Eli grows tired of the violence of their trade and begins to imagine another life, while Charlie insists that the job must be finished.
A nameless cowpuncher on a Wyoming ranch falls for the new schoolteacher from Vermont while feuding with a ranch hand named Trampas. His code of honour is tested by a cattle thief, a lynching and a duel, in a territory where the law is still being made.
Jane Withersteen runs a Utah ranch under pressure from Mormon elders who want her to marry one of them. When the gunslinger Lassiter arrives looking for the men who destroyed his family, his quarrel with the town's leaders becomes hers, and she must decide how far she will go to protect the people she has taken under her wing.
Stolen from a comfortable California home, the dog Buck is sold into the Klondike gold rush and forced to haul sleds through frozen wilderness. Amid cruelty and hardship he discovers a wildness within himself that calls him away from men.
In the 1850s, a teenage runaway known only as the kid drifts into a borderland of scalphunters and broken towns. He joins the Glanton gang, whose campaign against Apache raiders becomes indiscriminate slaughter, shadowed by a pale, learned judge who preaches war as the highest law.
In 1925 the explorer Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon to find a fabled civilization he called Z, and never came out. Decades later a journalist follows the same trails, sifting clues and rumors to learn what became of the missing expedition.
In a militarised near-future American West, a young woman flees an arranged marriage and hides in a travelling library. The librarians turn out to carry banned books and help people cross the border, and she finds a purpose, a community, and a woman she loves.
In an alternate 1878, Karen Memery works at a brothel in Seattle. When a badly injured woman arrives with a ruthless man on her trail, Karen is pulled into a hunt for a serial killer, a corrupt election and a mess of dangerous inventions.
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.
Daphne Pembroke needs help to free her kidnapped brother, so she hires Rupert Carsington, a strong, reckless nobleman with more charm than sense. Their search for him and a stolen papyrus takes them up the Nile, where tomb robbers, the desert and their growing feelings prove equally dangerous.
In 1947, pregnant and unmarried Charlie follows a lead about her missing cousin to a ruined woman in London. Their search draws on the story of Eve, a spy who ran a network in occupied France during the First World War, and the betrayals that broke it.
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.
Raised by Vikings after they kill his father, the Saxon boy Uhtred must choose between the people who love him and the kingdom of his birth. As Alfred of Wessex battles the Danes, Uhtred becomes a warrior torn between two worlds.
In Victorian England, Anna Champion offends the wealthy Christopher Davenport at a ball, and he sets out to ruin her. Using his charm and money, he turns her family's world upside down and brings her into his household. Anna fights back with wit and courage, even as their hatred turns into something more dangerous.
In Clanton, Mississippi, a Black father shoots the two men who attacked his young daughter and hires a young white lawyer to defend him. The town splits along racial lines as the murder trial approaches, with the Ku Klux Klan threatening the defense team and the jury.
Betrayed on the eve of his wedding and imprisoned for years, Edmond Dantès escapes with a fortune and returns under a new name. Patiently, he engineers the ruin of the men who stole his life.
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.
Atticus Turner returns from the Korean War to find his father missing and a strange letter pointing to a house in rural New England. He sets out with his uncle and a childhood friend, and their search leads them into a secret order that wants something only Atticus's family can give.
Start with “True Grit”, “News of the World”, “Lonesome Dove”: they are the closest to “The Searchers” 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 “The Searchers” these are Wild West, Revenge, Missing Person), 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 “News of the World”, “The Revenant”, “The Sisters Brothers”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
