Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Exploration

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: The Bright Edge of the World
Author: Eowyn Ivey
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 413

Synopsis: 

In the Winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach his newly pregnant wife, Sophie, if he doesn’t return – because once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there’s no telling what awaits him. As Forrester and his men map the territory, they cannot escape the sense that some greater, mysterious force threatens their lives.

Left behind at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie yearns to explore the world alongside her husband. She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it does of Allen, and that her courage and her faith will both be tested to the breaking point.

The year becomes a turning point for Allen and Sophie Forrester – and, more than a century later, their legacy will change the course of many lives.

Title: The Revenant
Author: Michael Punke
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: October 2015
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier. Based on a true story, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.

Title: The Three Musketeers
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Translator (from French): William Barrow
Publisher: The Reader’s Digest
Publishing Date: 2013 (1844)
No. of Pages: 568

Synopsis: 

All For One, One For All!

When daring young swordsman d’Artagnan travels to Paris seeking honor and fortune in the king’s Guard, he quickly befriends the famed three Musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

Loyal servants to the crown, the four friends cross swords with street criminals, face the cardinal’s Guards in duels to the death, and save the honor of the queen by unraveling treasonous schemes in a race against time. It will take epic courage, chivalry, and skill to thwart the plots against them and achieve victory at last.

Alexandre Dumas’s classic swashbuckling tale of adventure, swordplay, and unbreakable friendship is enriched with brand-new, action-packed illustrations by renowned artist Brett Helquist. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Heart of Darkness
Author: Joseph Conrad

Synopsis: 

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.

A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Right Stuff
Author: Tom Wolfe

Synopsis: 

Tom Wolfe at his very best” (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series.From “America’s nerviest journalist” (Newsweek)–a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. “Millions of words have poured forth about man’s trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves – in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic. (Source: Goodreads)