We are pleased to present the latest update of the Lab Lit List, our iconic database of fiction about scientists. This time around we have 26 regular novels, three plays and three novels in the ‘crossover’ category (i.e., hard science fiction with particularly good renderings of scientists) to add. As always, thanks to Dom for helping to find most of these – you can read more about his process in this companion article.

By popular demand we have also – finally – re-ordered the main list of novels alphabetically by surname. Sorry that it has taken so long.

This update coincides with our 20th anniversary edition. Elsewhere in these pages you can find our updated graph of lab lit, which charts the seemingly unstoppable rise of the genre from a trickle to a modest…flood is too strong a word, but over the past decade it’s averaged 16 books per year, whereas before the 1980s, it was one or two per year, and usually nothing at all. So this is another milestone to celebrate!

Something missing? If you know about a book that you think should be on the master list, please do let us know at editoral@lablit.com.

In the meantime, happy reading! All the new works are listed below.

NOVELS

The Only Woman in the Room

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of Hedy Lamarr, an actress who was also a scientist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Her Hidden Genius

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of scientist Rosalind Franklin, in which she is obscured by her male colleagues and rivals.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Magnus

by Mark Carew
Thriller: Students and a professor clash while doing fieldwork on a small Norwegian island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

You Can’t Hurt Me

by Emma Cook
Thriller: Anna is working on the biography of charismatic neuroscientist Nate, but ends up uncovering his toxic secrets.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Small Museum

by Jody Cooksley
Thriller: Newly married to a naturalist in the Victorian era, Madelaine is framed for a crime she did not commit.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

by Nicholas Drayson
Comedy/Lab lit lite: Two rivals for the affection of the East African Ornithological Society’s bird-walk leader agree on a competitive bird-watching contest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bonding

by Mariel Franklin
Thriller: Mary meets a brilliant young chemist working on an experimental drug claiming to cure the anxieties of modern life, but she soon discovers there are side-effects.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Speak

by Louisa Hall
Historical drama: An exploration of the creation of Artificial Intelligence, though five disparate characters over many years, including Alan Turing.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Not in Love

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: A biotech engineer at a food science start-up falls for the man who is leading a hostile take-over of the business.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Great Divide

by Christina Henriquez
Historical drama: An exploration of the construction of the Panama canal through the lives several people, including a scientist dedicated to eliminating malaria.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Alternatives

by Caolinn Hughes
Drama: When a geologist disappears, her sisters track her down to a remote bungalow in rural Ireland, where they confront old wounds and diagnose new ills.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Stars Turned Inside Out

by Nova Jacobs
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When a young physicist is discovered dead at CERN, an investigator uncovers petty rivalries and wonders what physics secrets are worth killing for.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Health of Strangers (2017)

by Lesley Kelly
Thriller/lab lit lite: After a plague, a small Health Enforcement Team in Edinburgh has to keep the lid on a new influenza virus and track down some missing girls. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Daniel

by Henning Mankell
Historical Lab lit lite: In 1875, a young Swedish entomologist in the Kalahari ‘rescues’ a boy whose family was killed, but when he takes him back to Sweden, the boy faces all the prejudices of the age. Translated from Swedish.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Sign of Her Own

by Sarah Marsh
Historical drama: Alexander Graham Bell betrays a deaf woman involved in the invention of the telephone.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Naturalist

by Andrew Mayne
Thriller: A computational biologist uses science to investigate what he thinks is the murder of one of his students. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Whale Fall

by Elizabeth O’Connor
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: When a dead whale washes up on a Welsh island, a young woman is drawn to two ethnographers studying island life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Shear

by Tim Parks
Drama: An English geologist working on a Mediterranean island becomes entangled in a nightmare web of deceit, corruption, lust and tragedy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Enlightenment

by Sarah Perry
Drama: Two men share an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Playground

by Richard Powers
Drama: In Polynesia, plans for floating cities bring four people together, including a marine biologist and an AI researcher.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mr Einstein’s Secretary

by Matthew Reilly
Historical/Lab lit lite: Hanna Fischer wanted to study physics under Einstein, but her life is disrupted by the Second World War.
Links: Amazon (UK)

There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: A split timeline links different people in the past, from Ashurbanipal in Assyria to Victorian London, a Yazidi girl in ISIS-controlled Iraq, and a hydrologist in the present.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Weeds

by Katy Simpson Smith
Historical Drama: Two women separated by time, but linked but their botanical work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pathways

by Katie Ward
Drama: A neuroscientist and her partner’s daughter struggle to form a relationship when the partner disappears.
Links: Amazon (UK)

One Perfect Couple

by Ruth Ware
Drama: Post-doc researcher Lyla joins a reality TV show, and things go horribly wrong.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Distant Dead

by Heather Young
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When the body of a former mathematics professor is found burnt to death in a desert, social studies teacher Nora Wheaton investigates what happened.
Links: Amazon (UK)

CROSSOVER NOVELS

Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman
Drama: In the 2030s, biobanks of lost organisms are cyber-attacked, wiping out the last traces of the perished species.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ascension

by Nicholas Binge
Drama: When a mountain appears in the Pacific Ocean and a group of scientists is sent to investigate, explorer Harry Tunmore agrees to join the secret mission, for reasons beyond scientific curiosity.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo
Drama: Using a neurological interface to translate her animal subject’s perception through her own mind, Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon realises a lifelong dream of being a wolf.
Links: Amazon (UK)

PLAYS

Dr Semmelweis

by Stephen Brown
Play: Drama about the real-life doctor who promoted hand washing to stop the spread of diseases.
Links: National Theatre

Farm Hall 

by Katherine Moar
Play: German nuclear scientists deal with life in British captivity in 1945.
Links: Guardian

Test Room Eight

by Lester Powell
Radio play: Philip Odell and his assistant investigate suspected sabotage at a pharmaceutical plant.
Links: Internet Archive

In fact, it’s too soon to reveal the results, but we, the LabLiterati, are currently in the process of analyzing the data needed to update the graph I published in Nature back in 2010 in the piece More Lab In the Library – which gave a tantalizing hint that the inflection point seen in the late 1980s might just well herald a meteoric rise (kicking in around the late 2000s). We’ll know more after we’ve crunched the numbers, but I’m feeling pretty confident that the slope is still heading upwards. It will be a nice way to get in the mood for our twenty-year anniversary in March 2025!

So what sort of books are in the upgrade? As always, it’s an astonishingly varied bunch. Historical fiction continues its reign in the genre, with multiple tales of fictional lady scientists in the Victorian era, and the usual clutch of stories populated by real scientific figures, from the well-known (Rosalind Franklin, Charles Darwin, Charles Audubon, Carl Linnaeus) to the less celebrated (John von Neumann, Guillaume le Gentil, Dorothy Horstmann  and Mileva Marić). Environmental peril, as ever, continues to feature, with tales of rewilding, scientists working clandestinely to evade governmental suppression of global warming, and even the incursion of a climate denialist into an Antarctic research station. So too do intrepid scientific detectives, solving murders. There are stories of missing persons, deadly outbreaks, struggling Ph.D students, family dramas – and a continuing enthusiasm for modern-day chick-lit-esque lab erotica. The most cutting-edged theme we identified, in a satiric novel, was a professor who’d been the victim of cancel culture.

The oldest book in the upgrade is The Insect Man, a semi-biographical children’s book published by Eleanor Doorly in 1936 (yet another historical drama, this time about the real-life entomologist Jean Henri Fabre). On the other end of the timeline, a whopping 22 titles were published in 2023 alone (with two already this year), bringing the total to 463.

None of this intel would be possible without the help of the LabLiterati, but in particular Dom, our ‘lab lit sniffer”, who scours bookshops and broadsheets and single-handedly found the vast majority of more obscure specimens. We also rely on our readers to nominate books we have missed. So do keep those great suggestions coming!

If you want to take a look at the latest entries in the Novels category, they appear after Andrea Rothman’s The DNA of You and Me. (You’d better hurry, though, because due to popular demand, we are about to rearrange the list into alphabetical order by author surname). We added six Crossover titles too, but as always, this category, alongside Television/Streaming and Films, is sadly neglected. If you think anything is missing, we’d love to hear from you about those as well.

We hope you enjoy all the new titles, and we expect our next upgrade to happen in the autumn. Until then, happy reading!

The variety of our latest additions is compelling – there really is something for everyone. We’ve got taut thrillers, historical dramas based on real-life events, romantic beach reads, soul-searching meditations, whodunnits, and what some might call ‘literary fiction’ (a category I confess I don’t quite see as very different from many other novels not so graced by critical opinion). We have examples from both debut and established authors, from under-represented voices, and translations from Chinese, Russian, Norwegian, French and Danish writers.

We are very grateful as always to Dom Stiles, our intrepid “lab lit whisperer”, who sourced the majority of these gems. But thanks are also due to reader nominations and efforts by the rest of the LabLiterati (members of our wonderful monthly Fiction Lab book group at London’s Royal Institution, where many of our titles get a thorough grilling). We would love to hear your suggestions too, if there’s anything we’ve missed.

If you haven’t visited the List for a while, head on over and take a look. (We add new additions onto the bottom of each category.) We hope you enjoy it!