Writer's Reads: Andrea Wulf

Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and best-selling author. Read more about her top literary picks below…

Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and best-selling author. Her latest book, The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity, is a biography of the pioneering naturalist and explorer George Forster.

Stuck on what books to read recently? Check out Wulf’s picks, from haunting novels like A Little Life to group biographies such as Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960) by Lawrence Durrell

I first read these four novels when I was 18, and I loved the way Durrell tells the same story from different perspectives.

Angle of Repose (1971) by Wallace Stegner

I fell into this novel and couldn’t stop reading. It follows Lyman Ward as he struggles to write the biography of his grandmother, who traded her glittering life in New York for the hardships of the 19th-century American West.

Entangled Life (2020) by Merlin Sheldrake

This non-fiction book about the fantastical world of fungi was an eye-opener that completely transformed my understanding of what an organism is.

Rituals (Rituelen, 1980; English translation, 1983) by Cees Nooteboom

From a masterful novelist and travel writer. This was the first of his books I read, and it made my mind soar; philosophy disguised as a novel.

The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers

If there is one perfect climate fiction novel, it is this. Powers magnificently weaves together science, nature, poetry and humanity.

A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara

Harrowing, haunting and utterly riveting. I read it on a long book tour in the USA and became so absorbed that I almost missed my flight while sitting at the departure gate.

The Lunar Men (2002) by Jenny Uglow

This is the book that made me fall in love with group biographies. Why tell the life of one person when you can bring to life a whole circle of people who changed the world?