The House of the Four Winds
by John Buchan | 
Blue Horizon
by Wilbur Smith | 
The Burning Shore
by Wilbur Smith | 
Rupert of Hentzau
by Anthony Hope | 
The Four Feathers
by A. E. W. Mason | 
A Time to Die
by Wilbur Smith | 
Men of Men
by Wilbur Smith | 
Huntingtower
by John Buchan | 
Shout at the Devil
by Wilbur Smith | 
Ursula, Under
by Ingrid Hill | 
Divining Women
by Kaye Gibbons | 
Power of the Sword
by Wilbur Smith | 
Gift Of Stones
by Jim Crace | 
Evidence of Things Unseen
by Marianne Wiggins | 
Hello to the Cannibals
by Richard Bausch | 
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan | 
The Runagates Club
by John Buchan | 
Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer | 
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain | 
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy |
When I was a child in short-coats a spaewife came to the town-end, and for a silver groat paid by my mother she riddled my fate. It came to little, being no more than that I should miss love and fortune in the sunlight and find them in the rain. The woman was a haggard, black-faced gypsy, and when my mother asked for more she turned on her heel and spoke gibberish; for which she was presently driven out of the place by Tarn Roberton, the baillie, and the village dogs. But the thing stuck in my memory, and together with the fact that I was a Thursday's bairn, and so, according to the old rhyme, "had far to go," convinced me long ere I had come to man's estate that wanderings and surprises would be my portion. It is in the rain that this tale begins. I was just turned of eighteen, and in the back-end of a dripping September set out from our moorland house of Auchencairn to complete my course at Edinburgh College. The year was 1685, an ill year for our countryside; for the folk were at odds with the King's Government, about religion, and the land was full of covenants and repressions. Small wonder that I was backward with my colleging. . . .