Themes
Books About Science and Discovery
Non-fiction and fiction that illuminate how science works — its triumphs, its errors and its human cost.
20 books · ranked
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1
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
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2
Persepolis
A girl grows up during and after the Iranian revolution; a witty, moving graphic memoir.
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3
Moneyball
How a cash-strapped baseball team used data to beat richer rivals; a gripping story about questioning everything.
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4
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai, an envoy from a galactic confederation, is sent to the planet Gethen — where all humans are ambisexual, able to be either male or female — to persuade the planet to join the confederation. Le Guin's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel is a sustained thought experiment about gender, society and what we assume to be natural that remains one of the most important works in speculative fiction.
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5
Flow
The psychologist who coined the concept of 'flow' — the state of complete immersion in a challenging activity — presents his research on optimal experience and argues that happiness comes not from leisure but from deep engagement with work and activity that stretches our abilities.
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6
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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7
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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8
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
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9
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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10
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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11
Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and abandons it, with consequences for both — the founding myth of science fiction, written when the author was barely twenty.
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12
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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13
Tenth of December
Ten stories in Saunders's distinctive voice — comic, tender, formally inventive, morally serious — about ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations: a man contemplating suicide, a test subject for experimental mood drugs, a child imagining a rescue fantasy. One of the most celebrated short story collections of recent decades.
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14
The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives are changed by trees — a chestnut tree photographed for generations, a couple bonded by a sentinel banyan, a scientist who discovers trees communicate — are drawn together in a defence of old-growth forests. Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes trees the protagonist of American history and asks whether human consciousness will arrive before or after the damage is done.
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15
A Raisin in the Sun
The Younger family — three generations of Black Americans living in a cramped Chicago apartment — await a life-insurance payout that each member hopes to use differently: a house in a white neighbourhood, a business, a medical education. Hansberry's landmark play takes its title from Langston Hughes and asks what happens to a dream deferred.
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16
The Plague
A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian port city of Oran, and the citizens find themselves quarantined in an absurd situation of suffering, solidarity and moral reckoning. Camus's most widely read novel is both a realistic chronicle of epidemic and an allegory of occupied France — and of any human community confronting an indifferent catastrophe that demands a collective response.
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17
Passing
Two light-skinned Black women meet by chance in Chicago in the 1920s: Irene is secure in her Black identity, while Clare is 'passing' as white in a marriage to a man who doesn't know. Larsen's compressed, devastating novella explores race, class, desire and the specific psychological violence of a world that forces people to choose.
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18
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is beautiful, witty and socially brilliant — and she is slowly sliding toward ruin. Wharton's first major novel traces Lily's downfall with the precision of a social scientist and the sympathy of someone who understood exactly how the gilded cage of New York society worked.
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19
Lessons in Chemistry
In 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott — a chemist who is not taken seriously in her field — becomes the unlikely host of a daytime cooking show, where she treats cooking as chemistry and accidentally inspires a generation of women to think differently about their intelligence and their lives. A witty, determined novel about how women change the world from the room they're allowed to occupy.
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20
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley is a stonemason in rural Dorset who dreams of entering the university at Christminster — a city that will never accept him. His relationships with his cousin Sue Bridehead and his marriage to Arabella Donn are both wrong for different reasons, and the novel follows their combined tragedy with an unsparing honesty that scandalized its first readers. Hardy's last novel.