We all have our favorite books featuring beautiful landscapes, urban love stories, and beach-filled summers. But despite those fantastic books, there’s one setting we shouldn’t overlook: the jungle. The jungle brings both danger and romance, all set in a thrilling backdrop. These five books are must-reads for people who love big adventures and bold characters.
5 Gripping Adventure Tales Set Deep in The Jungle
Lily Bushwold’s teaching job in Bolivia may have fallen through, but she’s not giving up. Without a stable family and with a history of petty crimes, Lily hopes to finally find a home in Bolivia. Her dreams seem to be coming true when she meets Omar, a Bolivian man, and starts a relationship. Lily ventures back to Omar’s remote home village with him, a ruthless and dangerous world of poachers, tribes, and businesspeople looking to exploit the jungle’s natural resources. While Lily’s relationship grows, she must learn to navigate the jungle and everything it holds because now her life depends on it.
In this “hypnotic, violent, unsparing” (A.J. Banner, USA TODAY bestselling author) thriller from the author of the “haunting, twisting thrill ride” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the Bolivian jungle, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.
Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a teaching job in Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.
When the gig falls through, world-weary Lily decides to stay in Bolivia when an intense passion finds her in the form she least expected: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try his hand at city life.
When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anaconda? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? Lovestruck Lily is oblivious. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle—its wonders as well as its terrors—using only her wits and resilience.
“Gripping, breathtaking, and exquisitely told—Into the Jungle pulls you into another world, returning you forever transformed” (Wendy Walker, USA TODAY bestselling author).
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A no-name actor in the 1970s jumps at a chance to work on a film set in the Amazon. As soon as he arrives, he realizes things are amiss; the production is riddled with problems, and it’s so hot that the film disintegrates. But things quickly get worse for the actor. He soon faces drug traffickers, guerilla fighters, and American capitalists. It’s immediately clear in this smart and gripping novel that in this role of a lifetime, the actor will be lucky to make it out alive.
Margio seems like a normal man, but he has a secret. Inside himself, he keeps concealed a supernatural female white tiger. Secrets live behind the white tiger, where two families linked by tragedy come together and torment the magical being inside Margio. The two families story continues to weave together in an inexplicable act of violence and the mystery and confusion that follow. A story set on the Indonesian coast that effortlessly blends dry humor and beautiful, evocative prose, MAN TIGER is a must-read for anyone looking for a powerful read in a vivid setting.
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Set in the Amazon rainforest, bestselling author Ann Patchett’s novel STATE OF WONDER follows Dr. Marina Singh as she sets out to find her mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson. While working on a new drug, Dr. Swenson has apparently disappeared into the jungle. In the depths of the Amazon, Dr. Singh is forced to confront her past and its tragedies and learn to navigate a treacherous world as she desperately searches for her lost friend, whose situation grows more perilous by the minute.
Ann Patchett’s deep research and lush worlds are nowhere more evident than in this novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice. Set in the Amazon, where pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh investigates the enigmatic Dr. Annick Swenson, whose mysterious research is being jealously guarded in the most remote areas of the rainforest.
This true story is about four friends who meet in Bolivia and set off on what promises to be a once in a lifetime adventure in the Amazon rainforest. But when Yossi is separated during rafting accident, he finds himself stranded in the middle of the jungle, without food, supplies, or survival training. Lost in one of the wildest places on Earth, Yossi faces seemingly insurmountable odds in his struggle to survive. JUNGLE is a remarkable true story about belief in yourself and beating the odds.
“A powerful story of self-discovery, survival in the wild.” —Los Angeles Times
Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, but what begins as a dream adventure quickly deteriorates into a dangerous nightmare, and after weeks of wandering in the dense undergrowth, the four backpackers split up into two groups. But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map, or survival training, he must improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his feet begin to rot during raging storms, as he loses all sense of direction, and as he begins to lose all hope, he wonders whether he will make it out of the jungle alive.
The basis of an upcoming motion picture, Jungle is the story of friendship and the teachings of nature, and a terrifying true account that you won’t be able to put down.
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