90 Books Like The Epic of Qayaq

Unlike Ivey’s other book The Snow Child, which grapples with the grief of infertility (a book I also love!), this book considers the opportunities a life without children allows for.

It opens with Lieutenant Colonel Allan Forrester as he prepares to lead an expedition into Alaska in 1885. His wife, Sophie, is an explorer in her own right and plans to accompany him—until they realize she’s pregnant and decide she has to stay behind.

Spoiler: Sophie miscarries and learns she will likely never be able to carry a baby to term. But this isn’t an endpoint for Sophie: instead, it sets her on a path toward professional and creative success, as well as love and happiness in her marriage.

We’re used to reading about how motherhood gives life meaning—I loved Ivey’s portrait of how not having kids can do the same.

Haines was best known as a poet, highly respected by other writers but uncompromising and without much commercial success or recognition. This collection of essays in the form of a memoir similarly makes no compromise, dispensing with plot, characters, or even a clear sense of time and geography. Instead, Haines takes the reader deep into the mind of a lone man surviving for decades in the harshest wilderness, thinking, observing, and writing—his own mind. And the writing is so strong, it turns out, that he doesn’t need those usually necessary tools of narrative he pointedly ignores. Instead, we feel the cold, see the hypnotic stars above the snow, and feel the brittle edge of aloneness. Through sheer stylistic austerity, those dark lonely nights are real.

Kizzia’s prose and reporting are unequaled, but this dark, Gothic tale is hard to read because of the real-life horror it exposes. The Pilgrim family came to Alaska in 2002, wrapping themselves in fundamentalist Christianity and fighting with the federal government like true pioneers in the wilderness—they became a cause for the right because of how they seemed to fulfill Alaska’s frontier myth. But it turned out the patriarch of the family had created a weird prison of rape and abuse for his uneducated children, which Kizzia was able to get inside with vividly told scenes. And that truth tells us even more about Alaska, which has the worst rate of rape in the nation and a shocking level of child abuse. 

This book is the most gripping and true-to-life tale I’ve ever read about growing up in the wilderness. As a young boy in northern Alaska, the author learned as much from wolves as from his few friends.

Mesmerizingly beautiful, frightening, and touching, this book made me cry when I finished it.

Faced with publishing debts after their boys' adventure magazine failed, two young men, the author, and James Adams, undertook a kayak expedition in the mid-1930s up the Scottish west coast from the Clyde to Mull, raising funds by selling reports to the press.

They learned much of the remote and deprived Highland economy, which stood the author in good stead later, editing the Daily Record and The Scotsman.

A long trip, including helping to take in the harvest in the autumn, it involved canvas kayaks, kilts, and buying provisions from farms, much more onerous than kit for present-day expeditions.

Originally published as Quest by Canoe, this version includes significant extra material, including press cuttings.

I love how candidly Audrey brings us along on her incredible adventures swimming and paddling the coast of Molokai. It felt like I had acquired a new best friend after reading this book. It’s rare to read stories by women whose desire to experience solitude in nature and “get away from it all” outweighs the fear of all the unknowns that the ocean and nature can present.

I loved her life principles, both as a mother and a human being, and coming along with her on these summertime adventures was pure joy with every page. 

Six experienced American whitewater kayakers took on what was perhaps the last river few had ever seen, and no one had fully run. It ran down from the high mountains of India, and their timing could not have been worse. After two weeks of heavy rain, even the upstream section was over its banks and running at near-turnpike speed. 

The skill levels of these six men were at the top of the game. They had won awards in kayak competitions, and had run everything difficult they could find in North America. I have no love of kayaking. Rather, I enjoy sitting higher in a canoe where I can see things over the banks around me, and can always bail-out and swim if I flip. However, at least for me, canoeing this water at this level would be suicide. 

Similar to the Grand Canyon at the time of Powell, it ran… show more.

This autobiography opens looking from the start line at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

A long book with a lot of detail, the pace hardly seems to drop. The author used some unconventional methods in his training, including on the sea, not usual for a sprint kayak racer.

This was on the Ayrshire coast when the M6 was still under construction and regular national squad training weekends were never north of Birmingham. Back home with his family, he also ran a local training group.

The title has a double meaning as he began manufacturing the world-renowned Lendal paddles, with further travel issues. The innovations had to be perfect, again with original thinking.

He produced the world's first GRP shafts and split paddles and handled issues of composite blades, cranks, aerofoils, and curved shafts.

This is a book that says 'can do' and does all the way through.

Pub walks books are common enough.

You drive there and tie in a walk with a visit to the pub. This is different. You paddle to the pub.

Over two dozen routes in the southeast of England are suggested, between Cambridge and Southampton, some to popular river or canal destinations, some more off the beaten track. Much attention is paid to the interests of kids.

The trips are graded by scenery, length, time, difficulty level, National Trust properties, castles, and canoe hire availability, with attention paid to people with physical difficulties or needing to rely on trains.

I have to declare an interest in this one, being involved in the layout of the content.

William, an Inupiaq Alaskan native, grew up in a sod home on the shore of Kotzebue Sound above the arctic circle. Childhood was a traditional subsistence life, living off the land. Starvation, sickness, and death were real and present threats. His early life contrasted greatly with the rest of his life. William was a crucial negotiator in the Alaska Native land claims settlement, one of the largest and most important in U.S. history. He went on to serve in the Alaska state house and senate. A fascinating story of a struggle for equality and the fight for a better future. This is a classic David and Goliath epic. I’ve worked in Kotzebue and many other Alaska villages, and I see the fruits of Williams's labors everywhere I go.