Introducing the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize Longlist

We are thrilled to announce the longlist for the annual Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Best Published Novel award. Seeking ‘An Adventure for Everyone’, the Prize champions stories that both honour the traditions of the genre, as well as those that deliver something new.

The twelve-strong longlist, selected by a panel of librarians and library staff from across the UK, includes works by British, Australian, American, Canadian, Georgian, Indian, Nigerian and South Korean authors. Five of the titles are debut works.

Download: 2024 Longlist Poster

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Find out more about each of the novels in the running for the £10,000 award below:

Author Image: ©Ivon Bartholomew

Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he's looking for somewhere to ride out what's ahead. He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven. Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby.

As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning.

In this entertaining and heart-warming novel Louis de Bernières pokes fun at modern mores, and makes us reconsider what is really precious in our short and precarious lives.

Author Image: ©Angelina Melwani

ONE BOY MISSING. ONE MAN UNDERCOVER. A WHOLE NATION AT RISK.

Detective Kamil Rahman is working for the Met Police when he gets the call from MI5. They’ve received intelligence of a terrorist plot, and it’s Kamil they need.

Posing as a disaffected cop, and working back in his friend Anjoli’s beloved restaurant on Brick Lane, Kamil attempts to infiltrate the cell. What he uncovers leads him halfway across the world to Kashmir, and face to face with an old nemesis.

Meanwhile Anjoli starts to investigate the disappearance of a young boy who’s sending coded messages to his parents. As she attempts to solve his clues, she finds herself in greater danger than she could have imagined. Time is running out for Kamil and Anjoli: can they save the boy, and save a nation, before it’s too late?

1901. On board the Ormen, a whaling ship battling through the unforgiving North Sea, Nicky Duthie awakes. Attacked and dragged there against her will, it’s just her and the crew – and they’re all owed something only she can give them.

1973. Decades later, when the ship is found still drifting across the ocean, it’s deserted. Just one body is left on board, his face and feet mutilated, his cabin locked from the inside. Everyone else has vanished.

Now, as urban explorer Dominique travels into the near-permanent darkness of the northernmost tip of Iceland, to the final resting place of the Ormen’s wreck, she’s determined to uncover the ship’s secrets. But she’s not alone. Something is here with her. And it’s seeking revenge...

Author Image: ©Erin Lewis

When Obiefuna's father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family's apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school. Surrounded by unknown faces that soon become friends, lovers and enemies, Obiefuna finds and hides who he truly is, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend. When he leaves school as a young man, Nigeria criminalizes same-sex relationships - and Obiefuna's life, or the life he wants to live, becomes even harder to envision - out of reach in a way that is more dangerous and tangible than before.

Told from the alternating perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, Blessings is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.

Author Image: ©Victoire Lethielleux

At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is sceptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that take place in WWII Indonesia; in Busan during the Korean war; in cold-war Pyongyang; in China. The stories are so colourful and various, at times so unbelievable, that they cannot surely all belong to the same woman. Can they?

As playful and thought-provoking as it is compelling, as brutal and harrowing as it is achingly poignant and tender, this is a novel about love and war, deceit and betrayal, about identity, storytelling and the trickery required for survival.

Rainbow, an African shaman travels through London in the early-nineteenth century in an attempt to locate the gods who will rescue his homeland from famine. Ending up with the mercenaries in the Peruvian War of Independence he finds his own resolution.

A period novel that deals with very contemporary issues of racism and colonialism.

Author Image: ©Rebecca Holmes Photography Ltd.

Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She knows her great uncle disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Arctic but she doesn't know why or how...

The 1850s is a time of discovery and London is ablaze with the latest scientific theories and debates, especially when a spectacular new exhibition of dinosaur sculptures opens at the Crystal Palace. Mary, with a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, is keen to make her name in this world of science, alongside her geologist husband Henry, but without wealth and connections, their options are limited.

But when Mary discovers some old family papers that allude to the shocking truth behind her great-uncle's past, she thinks she may have found the key to securing their future... Their quest takes them to the wilds of Scotland, to Henry's intriguing but reclusive sister Maisie, and to a deadly chase with a rival who is out to steal their secret...

\Author Image: ©Erlend Sæverud

The bombing of Rome in 1943 leaves fourteen-year-old Massimo orphaned and with no choice but to set out on a perilous journey to find his remaining family in Naples. A chance meeting with the mysterious and charismatic Pietro Houdini will deliver both of them to the doors of the monastery of Monte Cassino, a centuries-old haven of contemplation, learning and art.

But the abbey is in the path of the relentless Allied advance to Rome. Pietro and Massimo need a plan to survive the coming onslaught and that means out-manoeuvring the Germans who are as interested in the abbey's art collection as in the murder of two of their officers in the town below. For their plan to work, they must dissemble, disguise, and outwit two armies using skills that Pietro has in spades, but as war edges ever closer, it becomes clear that Massimo is not without a surprise or two either...

The Curse of Pietro Houdini is a sweeping tale of resilience, hope and survival which is at once an action-packed adventure heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history and a
philosophical coming-of-age story.

In 1579, a Portuguese trade ship sails into port at Kinchotsu, Japan, loaded with European wares and weapons. Also aboard is an East African slave. Taken from his village as a boy, sold to mercenaries and forced to fight in Indian wars that meant nothing to him, he is a young but experienced soldier. Serving as the protector for a high-ranking Italian priest, the young man joins an expedition pushing inland towards the capital city of Kyoto. There they meet Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful warlord in Japan, who is preparing a campaign to unify the country after more than a hundred years of civil war. Under the tutelage of Nobunaga, the young African soldier becomes the great warrior Yasuke, Japan’s first foreign samurai, and the only one ever of African descent. His preoccupation is not a question of power, as it is for Nobunaga, but one of freedom.

A timeless, epic story, a magnificent reconstruction and moving study of a lost historical figure, and a truly enthralling narrative, thrilling in its dramatization of the making of modern Japan, from which rises the most unlikely of heroes.

Yoruba gods liberating a Nigerian artefact from London's British Museum, this is a heist novel filled to the brim with magic. Shigidi is a disgruntled nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company, reluctantly answering the prayers of his few remaining believers to satisfy the demands of the company board. When he meets Nneoma, a sort-of succubus with a long and secretive past, everything changes. Together, they attempt to break free of their constraints and live on their owns terms. But the elder gods have other plans for Shigidi, and the Orisha Spirit Company is not so easy to leave. The chairman has a final job for Shigidi and Nneoma, one that will take them to the very heart of the British Museum.

From the boisterous streets of Lagos to the rooftop bars of Singapore and the secret spaces of London, Shigidi and Nneoma will encounter strange creatures, rival gods and manipulative magicians as they are drawn into a spectacular heist that spans two realms and which could turn their own worlds upside down...

In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money.

Mary’s dual existence as Mark will lead to a role as a footman in a grand house, serving a French mistress; to the navy, learning who to trust and how to navigate by the stars; and to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, finding love among the bloodshed and the mud. But none of this will stop Mary yearning for the sea. Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman. She will become a pirate.

Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history’s most remarkable figures.

Saba’s father is missing, and the trail leads back to Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s been two decades since Irakli fled his war-torn homeland with two young sons, now grown men. Two decades since he saw their mother, who stayed so they could escape. At long last, Tbilisi has lured him home. But when Irakli’s phone calls stop, a mystery begins...

Arriving in the city as escaped zoo animals prowl the streets, Saba picks up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs. As the voices of those left behind pull at the edges of his world, Saba will discover that all roads lead back to the past, and to secrets swallowed up by the great forests of Georgia. In a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost homeland, Hard by a Great Forest is a rare, searching tale of home, memory and sacrifice – of one family’s mission to rescue one another, and put the past to rest.

Six of these titles will progress to the shortlist and then on to the 2024 judging panel. Have you read any? Vote for your favourites over the summer and the top reader’s choice will equate to one seat on the judging panel. Tell us what you think on social media using #AdventureWriting.

For information on previous longlists, shortlists and winners, click here.