Novels

• Novels
• Crossover novels
• Films
• Plays
• TV

Paper

by John McCabe
Black comedy/thriller: A disgruntled biochemist is threatened by boredom, boss and vial of phenol.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Carbon Dreams

by Susan M. Gaines
Drama: A female geologist struggles with career and love in California.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Arrowsmith

by Sinclair Lewis
Drama: A scientist/medic leans the hard way that pure research is more noble – and cures plague in the process.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mendel’s Dwarf

by Simon Mawer
Black comedy: A megalomaniac achondroplasiac geneticist studies his own disease.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd
Drama/Thriller: Mathematics meets malign chimps – Jane Goodall with a twist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers
Drama: Love, music, art, literature, DNA coding and computers in one heady intellectual mix.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers
Drama: In this haunting story, a writer-in-residence recovers from personal tragedy by helping colorful, well-drawn neurologists build a sentient AI program.
Links: Amazon (UK)

As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem
Drama: A particle physicist falls in love with a black hole of her own creation.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson
Comedy/thriller: A fun-loving ecoterrorist chemist stumbles onto something more alarming than the usual toxic sludge in Boston Harbor.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Boric Acid Murder

by Camille Minichino
Mystery: A retired physicist gets caught up in a library murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Passage

by Connie Willis
Drama: Near-death experiences under the microscope – is Heaven the Titanic? A scientist attempts to work out the brain physiology behind that long glowing tunnel.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bellwether

by Connie Willis
Humor: The queen of science fiction sets her favorite genre aside to pen an entirely mainstream tale; capers, chaos theory and a flock of sheep feature in this rom-com set in a research institute.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Triplet Code

by B. B. Jordan
Mystery: A scientist can’t help noticing when her colleagues start dropping dead.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson
Drama: Physicists becoming One with each other and the universe.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Periodic Table

by Primo Levi
Semi-autobiographical fiction: A chemist survives Auschwitz.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cantor’s Dilemma

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: What would you do to win a Nobel?
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

The Bourbaki Gambit

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: A secret group of researchers make a key discovery: their egos don’t like being buried.
Links: our review • our author profile • Amazon (UK)

Menachem’s Seed

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Sperm-snatching on the academic conference circuit.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

NO

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Scientists study penile erection and things get a bit personal.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

The Struggles of Albert Woods

by William Cooper
Humor: One minor scientist’s battle to become not-quite-so-minor.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pharmacology Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle (and others in the series)
Mystery: A graduate student goes undercover.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Thinks

by David Lodge
Humor: The Humanities vs. the Arts: a cognitive scientist and a novelist attempt to speak the same language.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Einstein’s Dreams

by Alan Lightman
Drama: A poetical, fictionalized account of Einstein’s discovery process, most of which happens while he is asleep.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Long For This World

by Michael Byers
Drama: A geneticist medic discovers a mutation in his patients that could lead to an ethically dubious cure for aging.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell
Mystery: Virigina Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta on the trail of a serial killer, with a hefty dose of forensic science (and many others in this series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Seaside Pleasures

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A tale of shells and snails, science and religion, love and death.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Figure in a Landscape

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A seal zoologist clashes with a guilt-ridden recluse.
Links: our author interview • Author’s website

Floating Stones

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A geologist toys with the irrational as he considers leaving family and career for a potter he meets while doing fieldwork.
Links: our author interview • Online Originals

Strong Medicine

by Arthur Hailey
Thriller: A women discovers the sins and secrets of the pharmaceutical industry.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Inspired Sleep

by Robert Cohen
Drama: A disgrunted PhD student tries to find solace in the dreams of a sleep research project.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture

by Apostolos Doxiadis
Humor/Drama: The black sheep of a family struggles to solve an age-old mathematical theorem.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cloud Chamber

by Clare George
Historical drama: A tale of nuclear physicists at the dawn of atomic science.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon
Drama: Lab lit lite: In considering an experimental new cure, a bioinformaticist must choose between love and the autism that facilitates his talents.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Measuring the World

by Daniel Kehlmann
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of an intense meeting between mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin in 1828 (originally in German).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Properties of Light

by Rebecca Goldstein
Drama: Burning love and murderous professional envy consume three physicists obsessed with understanding the quantum physics underpinning light.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Leaky Establishment

by David Langford
Humor: A caustic and humorous send-up of the nuclear research industry in Britain written by a former weapons physicist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson
Drama: Lab lit lite: An invertebrate zoologist returns home after many years of estrangement from her family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Quite a Year for Plums

by Bailey White
Drama: Lab lit lite: A plant pathologist learns how science should be used to understand nature rather than to conquer and master it.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver
Drama: Lab lit lite: A lone wildlife biologist lives in the woods and studies coyotes while attempting to sort out her personal life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

This Thing of Darkness

by Harry Thompson
Historical Drama: Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle viewed through the eyes of Captain Fitzroy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton
Historical Drama: Darwin again, this time seen through the eyes of two modern-day, lovelorn scholars – Possession for the evolutionarily minded.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Intuition

by Allegra Goodman
Drama: Secrets, lies and scientific fraud threaten to tear apart a close-knit cancer laboratory.
Links: Amazon (UK) • Nature review by LabLit’s editor

Enigma

by Robert Harris
Historical fiction: A brilliant mathematician struggles to crack German codes in the second world war.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson
Historical fiction: Alan Turing as a troubled mathematical soul in this brilliant blend of fact and fancy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Whistling Woman

by A.S. Byatt
Drama: Lab lit lite: Snail scientists almost completely diluted by an exhaustive cast of characters in this ‘novel of ideas’ (preceded by three other books in a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Whiff of Death

by Isaac Asimov
Mystery: Petty politics and murder in this still-timely 1958 tale of an assistant professor in a chemistry department, penned when Asimov was a chemistry professor himself.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Scorpion’s Tail

by Sylvia Torti
Drama: Written by a biology PhD and set in Chiapas during the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, this novel features two field ecologists who get caught up in something they never expected.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Wegener’s Jigsaw (One Day On the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead)

by Clare Dudman
Historical drama: A fictionalized autobiography of the scientific revolutionary Alfred Wegener, the main proponent of continental drift.
Links: the author writes in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

98 Reasons For Being

by Clare Dudman
Historical drama: A biographical novel about another scientific revolutionary, the experimental psychiatrist Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann.
Links: the author writes in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Thriller: A rich scientific, political and cultural environment and dangerous ecoterrorists feature in this exciting tale.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: Scientists and policy wonks struggle to cope with the impending threat of global warming – with great insights into the culture of scientific funding (first of trilogy entitled ‘Science in the Capitol’).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: The trilogy continues as the Gulf Stream stalls and a mini-Ice Age descends on D.C. – genetically engineered lichen to the rescue? (Part 2 of trilogy).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: An eco-friendly president is elected, but will it be too late? (part 3 of trilogy).
Links: our author interview • our review • Amazon (UK)

The Search

by C. P. Snow
Drama: From the scientist father of ‘the two cultures’ idea, an x-ray crystallographer participates in a few scientific cover-ups.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Small Back Room

by Nigel Balchin
Drama: Classic lab lit from the 1940s about wartime boffins, by someone who was there.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Talk Nerdy to Me

by Vicki Lewis Thompson
Humor: An electrical engineer hero and a sexy, brainy heroine build a working bio-fuelled hovercraft in her garage (part of ‘The Nerd Series’).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes
Drama: A brilliant, creative organic chemist tries to manage a complicated life without descending into madness while developing her breakthrough theory.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cannery Row

by John Steinbeck
Humor: A marine biologist presides over a bohemian field station with a colorful cast of whores, gamblers, bums, drunks and artists (based loosely on the life of Ed Ricketts).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

by Janna Levin
Historical Fiction: A poetic account of the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, just on the border between fiction and non-fiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Life

by Gwyneth Jones
Drama: A young geneticist makes her way through her life as a scientist, wife and mother.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lust

by Geoff Ryman
Black Comedy: A thirty-something government scientist with an overactive imagination grapples with his urges.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Radiance

by Carter Scholz
Drama: Young physicists become drawn into weapons work at the Lawrence Livermore lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Luminous Fish

by Lynn Margulis
Drama: A tale of atmospheric scientists from the founder of the endosymbiosis theory, via an ultimately unsatisfying symbiosis of fiction and autobiography.
Links: Scientist review by LabLit’s editor • Amazon (UK)

The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Martinez
Drama: A math graduate student and a logician try to find out who killed an old woman who was involved in Enigma.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday
Comedy/Drama: A fisheries scientist struggles to create a salmon habitat in the desert.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Gift

by Jon Kalb
Drama: Greed and sabotage in the hominid fossil-hunting world, written by an archaeologist who should know.
Links: Nature review by LabLit’s editor • Publisher’s site

Lethal Genes

by Linda Grant
Mystery: Death and subterfuge in a Bay Area plant genetics lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cold Dark Matter

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A suicide in a remote astronomical observatory opens up an even older, Cold War era mystery.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dead Water Creek

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A researcher blows the whistle on a lab head siphoning off funds in a fisheries laboratory, but there’s more to the crime than meets the eye.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Hole in Texas

by Herman Wouk
Drama/Romance: An aging particle physicist runs afoul with Congress, the Chinese and the CIA in his quest for the Higgs Bosun.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Kepler

by John Banville
Historical fiction: The more human side of the famous astronomer is brought to life.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville
Historical fiction: Copernicus attempts to reconcile theory with fact as he develops his theory of the heliocentric solar system.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Final Theory

by Mark Alpert
Thriller: Terrorists and the FBI battle it out over Einstein’s ‘lost’ unification theory.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Sun and Moon Corrupted

by Philip Ball
Drama: A troubled journalist goes on the trail of a mysterious fringe scientist.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Experimental Heart

by Jennifer L. Rohn
Thriller/Romance: A love-struck workaholic obsesses over a mysterious woman and her new vaccine in a London cancer research institute.
Links: CSHL Press • Amazon (UK)

Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson (plus two others in the The Baroque Cycle)
Historical fiction: An alternative history in the 17th Century, complete with authentic scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Quantum

by Tom Grace
Mystery: An invention yielding unlimited power could start a wonderful new industry or the end of the world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gravity’s Chain

by Allan Goodwin
Drama: Life changes for a brilliant young scientist who unifies Relativity and Quantum Theory.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tensleep

by Sarah Andrews
Mystery: Like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, forensic geologist Emily Hansen uses geological clues to solve crimes while climbing the professional ladder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Principal Investigation

by BB Jordan (and others in the same series)
Mystery: Can virologist Dr. Celeste Braun stop a former Harvard researcher from creating a virus and selling the only cure to it?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sequence

by Lori Andrews
Mystery/Crime: Alexandra Blake, a geneticist with major commitment issues and a taste for old cars, takes on mysteries.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon
Mystery: A group of scientists race the Nazis to finish the first atomic bomb.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett
Historic fiction: Do swallows really sleep under water? A collection of short stories blending history, science and fiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Behaviour of Moths

by Poppy Adams
Drama: Lab lit lite: A moth expert compares the situation of moths to her own life than that of her family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes

by Ann Lingard
Drama: Lab lit lite: The lives and loves of three women in Cumbria: a widowed sheep farmer, a taxidermist and a mathematician.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

The Housekeeper and The Professor

by Yoko Ogawa
Drama: Lab lit lite: A touching Japanese novella about the housekeeper to an amnesiac math professor, and her young son.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gloryhits

by Bob Stickgold and Mark Noble
Thriller: Scientists try to save the world from a deadly virus in this 70s classic penned by real scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Story of Forgetting

by Stefan Merrill Block
Drama: Lab lit lite: A science nerd desperately tries to understand his mother’s Alzheimer’s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sun at Midnight

by Rosie Thomas
Drama: A young Oxford geologist travels to Antarctica and finds love.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey
Genre: A professor of theoretical physics stumbles into a dangerous plot.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Schrödinger’s Ball

by Adam Felber
Comedy: Erwin Schrödinger and a cast of zany characters get drawn together by a freak traffic accident.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh
Drama: A cetologist studying the elusive Ganges Dolphin discovers a stormy history of unrequited love and loss in the Indian Sundarbans.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Log from the “Sea of Cortez” 

by John Steinbeck
Drama/Comedy: A blend of fiction and fact, the author and his scientist friend keep a ship’s log.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gravity’s Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon
Drama: Lab lit lite: scientists study bombs and the paranormal in this classic epic tale of the dreg-ends of World War II.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Turbulence

by Giles Foden
Historical drama: Met office scientists struggle to predict the weather for the D-Day Landings.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The First Circle

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Drama: A fictional account of imprisoned Soviet scientists working on secret projects for Stalin.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Girl Pretending To Read Rilke

by Barbara Riddle
Drama: A young woman’s struggles to begin a career in bioscience amid the backlash from a fateful telegram.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two real Victorian natural historians struggling in a man’s world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Trouble With Lichen

by John Wyndham
Drama: Two scientists run into trouble when they accidentally discover the biological secret of staying young.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dreaming Jungles

by Michel Rio
Drama: A French aristocrat travels to the jungles of Africa in the early 20th Century to study chimpanzees.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mrs Einstein

by Anna McGrail
Historical drama: Einstein’s abandoned daughter resolves to haunt her father’s scientific career and master physics.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Particles and Luck

by Louis B. Jones
Comedy: A young theoretical physicist gets sucked into a crazy caper.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dork of Cork

by Chet Raymo
Drama: An amateur astronomer finds his ideas about God, women, and himself challenged when he meets the mainstream scientific community.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Where The Sea Used To Be

by Rick Bass
Drama: The struggle between a prickly Texas oilman and his daughter, an expert on wolves, for the souls of the two geologists who become her lovers
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers
Drama: Lab lit lite: a mixed-raced music-loving family headed by a physicist grapples with racism in during the American Civil Rights movement.
Links: Amazon (UK)

About Grace

by Anthony Doerr
Drama: A hydrologist in isolation sets out to find his long-abandoned daughter.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison McLeod
Drama: Lab lit lite: the action moves between a growing cathedral in France in 1284 and Fermilab in 2001, where a rebel physicist’s daughter keeps a mysterious secret.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers
Drama: A famous cognitive neurologist investigates a strange case of Capgras syndrome
Links: Amazon (UK)

Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers
Drama: A geneticist thinks he’s found the scientific cause of happiness.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Anthill

by EO Wilson
Drama: The story of boy who grows up to be a naturalist and a lawyer, determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Impact Factor

by Paul Brand
Drama/Thriller: In Dutch. A young female scientist gets into trouble after sleeping with the competition at an international symposium
Links: Amazon (UK)

Return to Almora

by Rajendra Pachauri
Drama: A semi-autobiographical account of the life and loves of the head of the International Panel on Climate Change.
Links: US Amazon only

Solar

by Ian McEwan
Black comedy: The professional and personal worlds of a past-it, Nobel-prize-winning physicist collide in a freak accident.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Conjurer’s Bird

by Martin Davies
Historical drama: An 18th Century naturalist uncovers the secrets of an extinct bird, while present day researchers seek his personal secrets.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe
Drama/comedy: Lab lit lite: a surly sleep researcher interacts with a group of other former students in a humorous tale about love, life and forty winks.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of mathematician G.H. Hardy’s discovery of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Story of Blanche and Marie 

by Per Olov Enquist
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of Marie Curie and the discovery of radium.
Links: Amazon (UK)

An Instance of the Fingerpost

by Iain Pears
Drama: Lab lit Lite: A group of people, including a mathematician, try to solve a murder in Oxford in 17th Century.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Game Control

by Lionel Shriver
Drama: A family-planning worker falls for a misanthropic population control biologist in Kenya.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Two On a Tower

by Thomas Hardy
Drama: An unhappily married lady breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with an astronomer who is ten years her junior.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Honest Look

by Jennifer L. Rohn
Drama: A young woman working in a biotech company makes a shocking discovery about the company’s new cure for Alzheimer’s.
Links: CSHL Press • Amazon (UK)

The Unfixed Stars (entitled ‘Percival’s Planet’ in the US)

by Michael Byers
Historical fiction: A pacy, fictionalized account of the real life story of Pluto’s discovery by a Kansas farm boy.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Deadly

by Julie Chibbaro
Drama for young adults: A 16-year-old girl in New York at the turn of the 20th century discovers a way into the masculine world of science.
Links: Amazon (UK)

State Of Wonder

by Ann Patchett
Drama: An enigmatic scientist working on an infertility cure in the Amazon is tracked down by her former student when a colleague is killed.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth

by Stuart Clark
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of the science and lives of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. First of a trilogy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Double Helix

by Nancy Werlin
Drama for young adults: A young man takes a detour into a biotech company before starting college – leaving him with more questions than answers about the scientific world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Spiral

by Paul McEuan
Thriller: A biological super-weapon destroyed during the Second World War is rediscovered: will there be time stop it?
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Music of the Spheres

by Elizabeth Redfern
Historical drama: French and British astronomers compete to find a lost planet in 1795 amidst the French revolution.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Deja Dead

by Kathy Reichs (and others in the series)
Drama: A forensic anthropologist solves crimes (also the novel behind the popular TV series “Bones”).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh
Drama: A scientist father and his loves ones grapple with an instance of Turner’s syndrome in the family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Germline 

by Nelson Erlick
Thriller: A scientist working on in utero gene therapy cures gets entangled in the dark scandal lurking beneath.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Don Among the Dead Men

by C E Vulliamy
Thriller: A lecturer in chemistry in the 1920s uses his own discovery for murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Giant, O’Brien

by Hilary Mantel
Historical fiction: A fictionalized reworking of the anatomist John Hunter and the Irish Giant, whose bones he coveted.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

The Sensorium of God

by Stuart Clark
Historical fiction: A fictionalized account of Newton, Halley and Hooke – second in a series after The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Lone Wolf

by Jodi Picoult
Drama:A scientist who studies wolves abandons his family to follow a pack in northern Quebec.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Heart Broke In

by James Meek
Drama: A parasitologist, her cancer researcher lover and her ex-rock star brother wade their way through complicated lives as scandal stalks them.
Links: Amazon (UK)

When The Killing’s Done

by T C Boyle
Drama: An environmental scientist fights public opinion – and animal rights activists – as she struggles to save rare island species by killing off invading rats and wild pigs.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Breathing On Glass

by Jennifer Cryer
Drama: A stem cell researcher struggles with her research while her sister battles with infertility.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens
Drama/Thriller: Sex, drugs and quantum physics collide with artificial intelligence, faith, and free will in a battle over the origin of the universe and the existence of the soul.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Coming Flu

by J.L. Greger
Thriller: Medical epidemiologist Sara Almquist races against time to protect her neighborhood when a deadly new flu blows into town (and others in the same series).
Links: the author writes in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver
Drama: A smart but poorly educated woman in rural Tennessee has her life transformed when scientists come to town.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Live With Lightning

by Wilson Mitchell
Drama
An ambitious young physicist struggles to make his mark in Academia, then in industry
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

The Krone Experiment

by Craig Wheeler
Thriller
An astrophysicist to the rescue as the US and the Soviets threaten to start a deadly war
Links: the author’s essay in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt
Drama: An astronomer thinks she’s found evidence contradicting the Big Bang theory.
Links: our review •Amazon (UK)

The Day Without Yesterday

by Stuart Clark
Historical fiction: Einstein and Lemaitre work towards a new view of the universe.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt
Historical fiction: The Holocaust, as viewed by a small group of research scientists (said to be modelled on the laboratory of real-life scientist Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky).
Links: Amazon (UK)

No Ordinary Matter

by Jenny McFee
Lab Lit lite: Two sisters, a neuroscientist and a soap opera writer, get caught up in a drama of their own.
Links: Amazon (UK)

George Letham: Médecin et Meurtrier (Physician and Murderer)

by Ernst Weiss
Drama: In German: A bacteriologist infects himself in a study of scientific egotism.
Links: English translation • Amazon (UK)

The Accident

by Dexter Masters
Drama: A nuclear physicist becomes ill after working on the Manhattan Project.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist

by Russell McCormmach
Drama: An aged physicist thinks back on his life and the great scientists who taught him.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Mind-Body Problem

by Rebecca Goldstein
Lab lit Lite: A philosophy graduate student drop-out hopes to rescue her life by marrying a genius mathematician.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Running From The Devil

by Jamie Freveletti (and others in the series)
Thriller: Biochemist Emma Caldridge crashes in the jungle and has to deal with guerrillas and a dangerous biological weapon.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Recombinations 

by Perri Klass
Drama: Scientists, would-be artists, single working women, young parents, and born-again Yuppies mingle to create a gentle social satire.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Edge of Chaos 

by Pamela McCorduck
Drama: Mathematicians in Santa Fe explore the fine line between frozen predictability and hopeless disorder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bounded Rationality

by Pamela McCorduck
Drama: Scientists in Santa Fe struggle with backdrop of 9/11 and what it means to be successful, in science as well as in life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott
Mystery: A modern-day mystery/fantasy set in Cambridge that features Isaac Newton’s obsession with alchemy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott
Historical fiction: Set in the 18th century, a British naturalist comes to Paris to work for the famous Lamarck
Links: Amazon (UK)

Strong Motion

by Jonathan Franzen
Mystery: A seismologist arrives in Boston and investigates recent earthquakes that might be linked to a chemical company.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Captivity

by Debbie Lee Wesselman
Drama: Chimpanzees are set loose from a sanctuary and cause ethical chaos.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch
Drama: A budding marine biologist has an unforgettable summer.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Borderline

by Bonnie Rozanski
Drama: A skewed coming-of-age story of a normal boy in a crazy world, with a scientist father and a mother who wants to cure his autistic brother.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Atmospheric Disturbances

by Rivka Galchen
Lab Lit Lite: Dr Leo Liebenstein is convinced that his wife has disappeared and that she has been replaced by a double.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Beyond Sleep

by WF Hermans, translator Ina Rilke-Mulder
Drama: A young Dutch geologist is determined to make a great discovery in a geological expedition.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wild Type

by Jeffrey Ivan Victoroff
Mystery/Thriller: Two NIH fellows begin their research in Washington and try and navigate through the bureaucracy and science.
Links: Amazon (US)

Pure

by Andrew Miller
Historical Fiction: In 18th Century Paris, an engineer trying to solve the problem of an overly full cemetery starts to realize that politics is everywhere.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Loop

by Nicholas Evans
Drama/Romance: A wolf biologist has to counter hatred against her object of study in a small town.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Good Benito

by Alan Lightman
Drama: A professor of physics struggles with life and in a tale of disillusionment.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry

by Thomas McMahon
Drama: The lives, scientific discoveries and excitement of the Manhattan Project through the eyes of a teenager.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Loving Little Egypt

by Thomas McMahon
Drama: A physics prodigy hacks into the telephone grid in 1920s to counter saboteurs.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Jackhammer Elegies

by Stefan Jaeger
Thriller: A structural engineer teams up with an FBI agent to stop a criminal mastermind.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Antisense

by Richard Marshall
Thriller: A scientist explores connections between the disputed theories of Lamarck and his own family’s past.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Dark Frontier

by Eric Ambler
Thriller: A physicist gets involved with international spies in a fictional Eastern Europe country in the 1930s to prevent a nuclear disaster.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Decoded: A novel

by Mai Jia
Drama: The story of a semi-autistic mathematical genius and one of the great code-breakers in the world (translated from the Chinese)
Links: Amazon (UK)

Plague and Cholera

by Patrick Deville
Historical fiction: Microbiologist Dr Alexandre Yersin is brought to vivid, thrilling life (translated from the French).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion

by A.R Taylor
Drama/comedy: A charming physicist cad flees Caltech and his three girlfriends for the Pacific Northwest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Resurrectionist

by Matthew Guinn
Drama: A medical college in South Carolina discovers mysterious bodies from a century ago.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Letters from Yellowstone

by Diane Smith
Drama (Epistolary): A group of scientists on an expedition in 1898 to catalogue the flora and fauna of Yellowstone Park before tourists, the railroad, local entrepreneurs and poachers destroy it.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tödliches Geflecht

by Axel Brennicke
Drama: (In German) A young molecular biologist discovers potential foul play in Southern France.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion
Drama: A geneticist who hasn’t had luck in dating turns his quest into an experiment and meets a woman who turns everything upside-down.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Imaginary Friends

by Alison Lurie
Drama: Two sociologists infiltrate a cult as participant-observers and are at risk of getting pulled under.
Links: Amazon (UK)

True Jacob: A Novel

by Tom Sriver
Drama: An American physics professor enlists after Pearl Harbor and is charged with finding a fabled uranium mountain on Java.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert
Historical drama: A female botanist in the Enlightened Age makes her way in the world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

These Are Our Children

by Julie Maxwell
Drama/comedy: A professor of neonatal medicine invents a new machine to save babies while his illicit lover is pregnant; is the baby his or her husband’s?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Syndrome

by Thomas Hoover
Drama: A clinic conducting stem-cell clinical trials seems to work wonders, but is it ethically sound?
Links: Amazon (UK)

The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara
Drama: A scientist medic and an anthropologist find an extremely long-lived yet senile tribe on an Micronesian island – do they have the keys to immortality?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Blueback

by Tim Winton
Lab Lit Lite: A boy grows up wanting to understand the sea and becomes a biologist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Only Witness

by Pamela Beason
Thriller: A gorilla is the only witness to a crime, and her psychologist trainer has to use her as an eyewitness (and others in the series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Leave Me Never

by Suzanne Carey
Romance: A pulp romance novel where the (brutish) male love object is a scientist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Too Late

by Zvi Yanai
Semi-Autobiographical Drama: (In Hebrew) A man’s ode to his lost ecologist brother.
Links: our review

Roger’s Version

by John Updike
Drama: A professor of divinity gets embroiled with a computer scientist who wants to prove the existence of God.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wives of Los Alamos

by Tarashea Nesbit
Drama: The wives who accompany their husband to the Manhattan Project tell their collective story.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

by Jacqueline Kelly
Children’s fiction: A girl in 1889 learns about Darwin and being a naturalist from her Grandfather, but society does not approve (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Archangel

by Andrea Barratt
Historical fiction: A group of five interlinked short stories tells the tale of discovery throughout the ages.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Secondary Immunization: A Scientific Mystery

by BB Jordan
Mystery: Virologist Dr. Celeste Braun finds the corpse of an FBI agent.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer
Historical fiction/thriller: A photojournalist captures the race to develop antibiotics during WWII, and stumbles over espionage, blackmail and murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Night of the Mi’raj

by Zoe Ferraris
Thriller: A traditional Saudi man is forced to work closely with a female forensic scientist to solve a murder (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler
Drama: A girl disappears, and her sister unravels the psychological mystery in her family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Trudeau Vector

by Juris Jurjevics
Thriller: An epidemiologist investigates murder at an Arctic research station and discovers something much bigger.
Links: Amazon (UK)

People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks
Drama: A book restoration expert travels to Sarajevo to save a lost treasure in the wake of the Bosnian war.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Rescue Mode

by Ben Bova and Les Johnson
Drama: A realistic tale of a manned expedition to Mars set in the present day.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Morpho Eugenia

by A. S. Byatt
Drama: (One of two novellas contained within Angels and Insects) A young Victorian clashes with his religious benefactor over Darwinism.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mr. Darwin’s Shooter

by Roger McDonald
Historical Fiction: Darwin’s famous sea voyage told from the point of view of his young servant.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Devil’s Garden 

by Edward Docx
Thriller: A zoologist confronts corruption in the jungle where his team of naturalists are working.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Not Easy Being Green

by Susy Gage
Thriller: A virus that makes things glow green escapes the lab, but is it an accident?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Slow Cold Death

by Susy Gage
Thriller: An aimless scientist lands in a lab where a suspicious death complicates everything.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht
Drama: A climate scientist grapples with upheavals in her itinerant life when she returns home.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Euphoria

by Lily King
Drama: Three anthropologists in the 1930s are caught in a passionate love triangle; inspired by the life of Margaret Mead.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Dinosaur Feather

by Sissel-Jo Gazan
Thriller: (Translated from the Danish) A bird biologist is about to defend her thesis when her supervisor is found dead in the lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Arc of the Swallow

by Sissel-Jo Gazan
Thriller: (Translated from the Danish) A scientist is killed to cover up dodgy dealings perpetrated against the developing world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Path of Minor Planets

by Andrew Sean Greer
Drama: A meeting of astronomers in the South Pacific in the 1960s is marred by the death of a boy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Cry and the Covenant

by Morton Thompson
Historical fiction: A fictionalized account of the life of Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian-Hungarian physician who researched puerperal fever.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James
Thriller: (And others in the same series) A forensics lab in the East Anglia fens grapples with the death of one of their own scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Rosie Effect

by Graeme Simsion
Comedy: A hopelessly hapless geneticist struggles to keep the first woman – now his wife – who he ever dated more than once.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Affair

by C.P. Snow
Drama: A scientist accused of scientific misconduct gets dismissed from a Cambridge college (first book in series)
Links: Amazon (UK)

The New Men

by C.P. Snow
Drama: A group of Cambridge scientists work on splitting the atom
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Jury

by Steve Martini
Drama: A medical researcher is accused of murdering a junior scientist
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Pawless Papers

by Robert Fagen
Drama: A satirical portrait of a scientist
Links: Amazon (UK)

Deep Blue

by Randy Wayne White
Mystery/Lab lit lite: Marine biologist Marion “Doc” Ford solves mysteries in a fictional Florida village (part of the Doc Ford series of many other books)
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cold Blood, Hot Sea

by Charlene D’Avanzo
Mystery: An oceanographer grapples with climate change denialists and the death of her colleague (part of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

This Living and Immortal Thing

by Austin Duffy
Drama/Dark comedy: An oncologist living in New York questions his own life decisions in science
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Raw Data

by Pernille Rørth
Drama: Two young scientists try to make their mark in the world of biomedical research
Links: Amazon (UK)

Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty
Thriller/Lab lit lite: A successful, married geneticist meets a stranger and her life starts to unravel
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Bird Skinner

by Alice Greenway
Drama: An ornithologist seeking solitude learns to live again
Links: Amazon (UK)

Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams
Historical fiction: A voyage of scientific and geographical discovery in 1785
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wolf Border

by Sarah Hall
Drama: A wolf biologist is asked to help reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside
Links: Amazon (UK)

Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels
Drama: A Russian scientist and inventor remembers love, music and science
Links: Amazon (UK)

Us

by David Nicholls
Lab lit lite: A biochemist fights for his marriage with his artist wife
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Origin: A Biographical Novel of Charles Darwin

by Irving Stone
Historical fiction: Charles Darwin’s life, told through narrative
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink
Lab lit lite: Portrait of the highs and lows of a pharmaceutical scientist’s marriage
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates
Drama: A neuropsychologist researcher undergoes a journey of self-discovery with her case study
Links: Amazon (UK)

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr
Lab lit lite: A young math whiz meets blind girl obsessed by shells in 1940s France
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Crossing

by Andrew Miller
Drama: An aloof scientist sails across the Atlantic on her own
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Martian

by Andy Weir
Drama: Stranded on Mars, a botanist has to fend for himself
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pandora’s Sisters

by Michael Stephen Fusch
Thriller: Who will win the battle over the key to a mysterious and game-changing stretch of DNA?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Everland

by Rebecca Hunt
Drama: Two sets of explorers lost in the fictional Antarctic island of Everland – in 1913 and 2012
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Neanderthal

by John Darnton
Thriller: Two rival archaelogists and former lovers discover a surviving race of Neanderthals
Links: Amazon (UK)

Open Grave

by Kjell Eriksson
Thriller; lab lit lite: After Professor Bertram von Ohler is awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, his neighbours don’t approve and mysterious things start to happen.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Three Weeks in December

by Audrey Schulman
Historical Fiction: In 1899, a young engineer leaves to construct a railroad in east Africa, while in 2000, an American ethnobotanist in east Africa stumbles into an old story.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Satin Island 

by Tom McCarthy
Drama: An anthropologist consulting for a company becomes almost overwhelmed by too much information.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Coffin Road 

by Peter May
Drama: A scientist washes up on a Hebridean island with no memory of the shocking things that have befallen him.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes
Drama: A female paleobotanist moves to Easter Island to follow her passion, mirroring the 1970s journey of another woman.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Conrad & Eleanor

by Jane Rogers
Drama/Thriller: Secrets are revealed during the disintegrating marriage of two scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Degrees of Freedom

by Susy Gage
Thriller: A murder disrupts a group of physics graduates in the early Nineties.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Night of Fire

by Collin Thubron
Drama: Seven people (landlord, priest, neurosurgeon, naturalist, photographer, schoolboy, traveler) in a house on fire, one chapter per character.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Lamentations of Zeno (translated from the German)

by Ilija Trojanow
Drama: A glaciologist working as a guide on an Antarctic cruise ship plans a desperate disruption
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dying to Know

by Alison Joseph
Thriller: A particle collider in Kent hosts a murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Resistance is Futile

by Jenny Colgan
Romantic Comedy: A brilliant female mathematician is recruited to a top-secret code breaking project
Links: Amazon (UK)

My Last Continent

by Midge Raymond
Drama: Two penguin specialists find love in Antartica when one of their ships end up in trouble.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Doubter’s Almanac

by Ethan Canin
Drama: A mathematician grad student in Seventies California finds himself while exploring the art of research.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Relativity

by Antonia Hayes
Drama: 12-year-old physics and astronomy savant Ethan navigates his family’s past.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore
Thriller: A toxicologist studying pain and death finds himself drawn to a mysterious woman.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Atomic Weight of Love 

by Elizabeth Church
Drama: The tale of an ornithologist married to a physics professor living in New Mexico in the early 1940s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Under a Pole Star 

by Stef Penney
Historical Fiction: A geologist from Manhattan falls for a miner’s daughter during an Arctic expedition in the late 19th century.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter

by John Pipkin
Historical Fiction: A women takes over her father’s legacy mapping the solar system and beyond.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Crossing Places 

by Elly Griffiths
Thriller: A forensic archaeologist gets tangled up in a murder (part of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Beautiful Young Wife

by Tommy Wieringa
Drama: A celebrated microbiologist has a midlife crisis when he finally settles down with one woman.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Terranauts 

by T.C. Boyle
Drama: A diverse group of people takes part in an ecological experiment in the Arizona desert.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Freud’s Alphabet

by Jonathan Tel
Historical Fiction: A fictionalised account of Sigmund Freud in London.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Last Days of Night

by Graham Moore
Historical Fiction/Thriller: A fictionalized account of a lawsuit as Tesla’s and Edison’s lightbulb tehnologies battle for supremacy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Catalyst

by Jennifer Ball
Drama: Against the backdrop of a volatile marriage, fraud rears its head in a chemistry lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry
Historical Fiction: An amateur Victorian naturalist with no patience for superstition is convinced that what local people think is a magical beast may be a yet-undiscovered species.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Last Pilot

by Benjamin Johncock
Drama: A trained pilot makes choices between family and the space program in the early 1950s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dragon Keeper

by Mindy Mejia
Drama:A reptile specialist in a zoo tries to protect her komodo dragon from a media frenzy after it appears to lay eggs without having a mate.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ann Veronica

by H.G: Wells
Drama: lab lit lite: A female biology major in Edwardian London finds love.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Evangelist

by Clare George
Drama: An evolutionary biologist writes his memoirs about the nature of science and God.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cat Zero

by Jennifer Rohn
Thriller: A female scientist joins forces with a sexist mathematician to understand a dangerous cat virus that may be a threat to humans.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey
Drama:A group of astronauts trains for a mission to Mars while their families come to terms with the prospect of separation.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Resolution 

by A.N. Wilson
Historical drama: A novel about Captain Cook’s discovery to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, as seen through the eyes of botanist George Forster.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cages

by Sylvia Torti
Drama: Two neurologists who experiment on songbirds in a university laboratory must confront emotional truths to be released from their own individual cages.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

by Christopher Edge
Young adult fiction: Albie’s parents are both scientists, and when his mother dies, his father is left to explain where she went.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Time and Space of Uncle Albert

by Russell Stannard
Young Adult fiction: Book one in the bestselling Uncle Albert science and adventure series.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Some Of Us Glow More Than Others

by Tania Hershman
Short stories: A collection reflecting what life is like at the cutting edge of technology.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Nucleus

by Rory Clements
Historical drama: During the second World War, which side will solve fission first and create the ultimate weapon? Classic territory but with a spy angle…
Links: Amazon (UK)

Thirst

by L.A. Larkin
Thriller: A glaciologist living in Antarctica gets wind of a global catastrophe. Is there time to save the world?
Links: Amazon (UK)

An English Guide to Birdwatching

by Nicholas Royle
Drama: A story about society, birds, social justice and a mix-up between two authors and their work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Museum of Cathy

by Anna Stothard
Historical Drama: Lab Lit Lite: A story about an English woman working as a curator of natural history in Berlin.
Links: Amazon (UK)

God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster
Drama: A female botanist has to decide whether to follow her Elon Musk-like husband into space to save their marriage.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Chemistry 

by Weike Wang
Drama: A chemistry PhD is bombing out of graduate school…is it the right thing for her to do?
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Host

by Robin Cook
Thriller: Why do all those routine hospital patients keep dying? A medical student and her lab partner start to investigate.
Links: Amazon (UK)

pH: A Novel

by Nancy Lord
Thriller: A marine biologist and his student crew embark on cruise in the Gulf of Alaska to understand the worrying acidification underway.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Devil’s Garden

by Edward Docx
Drama: A research team studying ants in the Amazon get endangered by a corrupt military regime.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Brother in Ice 

by Alicia Kopf
Drama: Lab lit lite. Translated from the Catalan. A curious blend of fact and fiction, art and science, superimposed over polar explorations past and present.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Perfect Marriage 

by Alison Booth
Romance/Thriller: A scientist meets a charismatic geneticist on a plane and her secrets begin to unravel.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Out of the Ice

by Ann Turner
Thriller: An environmental scientist stumbles into a psychological drama on a remote Anatarctic island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Happiness

by Aminatta Forna
Drama: A psychiatrist and a biologist meet up in London and start to look into why an immigrant child has gone missing.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Overstory

by Richard Powers
Drama: A complex and unusual tale of trees: eight characters (one of whom is a scientist) struggle to save the forests.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Tempter

by Norbert Wiener
Drama: Engineer-scientist Gregory James draws another scientist into subterfuge.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Give Me Your Hand

by Megan Abbott
Thriller: Old friends and rivals with a deadly secret suddenly find themselves as researchers in the same lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Chemistry Lesson

by Meredith Goldstein
YA Romance: A lab researcher experiments with pheromones to try to rekindle her love life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

We Love You, Charlie Freeman 

by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Drama: Lab lit lite: An African-American family is invited to live with a chimp as part of a scientific study – but is it as simple as it seems?
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett
Historical Drama: The crew of The Narwhal sets out in 1854 to explore the Artic region.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Servants of the Map 

by Andrea Barrett
Historical Fiction/Romance: A collection of stories and novellas on the border of science and desire
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account about John Harvey Kellogg, the real-life inventor of cornflakes, and his science of ‘wellness’ (inspired a film by the same name).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Shooting the Sun 

by Max Byrd
Drama: A tale, part fiction and part fact, about an expedition to see an eclipse in the 1840s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Confessing a Murder 

by Nicholas Drayson
Historical Fiction: The story about the Theory of Evolution told from the point of view of a fictional character who ‘knew’ Darwin and Wallace.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Creation

by Katherine Govier
Historic Drama: A fictionalized account of the naturalist John Audubon during the creation of his masterpiece, Birds of North America.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Signal and Noise 

by John Griesmer
Historical Drama: A story about laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, with a fictional main character embedded in plenty of historical fact.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Hippolyte’s Island, An Illustrated Novel

by Barbara Hodgson
Illustration : Fictional map drawer and explorer Hippolyte Webb on a quest for vanished lands – with many details from actual real-life explorations.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla, who has built a live-in lab in a New York hotel.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Memory Artists

by Jeffrey Moore
Drama: A story about memory disorders and a grad student who want to find a cure for his mother’s Alzheimer’s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

An Imperfect Lens 

by Anne Richardson Roiphe
Historical Drama: Chemists from Paris search for the source of the cholera epidemic in 1880s Egypt.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Extinctions 

by Josephine Wilson
Drama: A retired engineer stuck in a nursing home gets shaken out of his morose musings.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Jennie 

by Douglas Preston
Drama: The tale of a chimpanzee brought up as a human child.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver
Drama: The tale of four generations who have occupied the same house in New Jersey, including amateur scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Red Arrow

by William Brewer
Drama: A man travels on the Frecciarosa ‘Red Arrow’ train to see ‘the Physicist’ whose memoirs he is ghost-writing.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Enter the Aardvark

by Jessica Anthony
Historical drama: An aardvark hunted by a Victorian naturalist and stuffed by his taxidermist threatens a politician’s career.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Invincible Summer

by Alice Adams
Drama: A small group of friends, one of whom is a physicist, is tracked over a period of years as their relationships develop.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Hundred Million Years and a Day

by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
Drama: A palaeontologist hears of a possible dinosaur skeleton in an Alpine glacier, and battles against time and weather to find it. Translated from French.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Split

by Sharon Bolton
Drama: A glaciologist hides from a murderer on South Georgia Island, with the back story involving a psychologist in Cambridge.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pantheon

by Sam Bourne
Thriller : A psychology don just back from the Spanish Civil War travels to the USA to search for his wife and child.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle
Historical Drama: A young academic’s family moves to a commune led by Harvard psychologisy Timothy Leary with a disparate group of people involved in experimenting with drug culture in the 1960s.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Pitying of Doves

by Stephen Burrows
Thriller/Lablit Lite: A bird-obsessed detective investigates when the director of a bird sanctuary and a Mexican diplomat are murdered. (Second of a series of ‘Birder Mysteries’ with this detective).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Love and Other Dangerous Chemicals

by Anthony Capella
Drama/Romance: A young Oxford biochemist funded by Big Pharma to produce a female ‘orgasm pill’ is confounded when one of his test subject fails to respond.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Tenth Muse

by Katherine Chung
Drama: A mathematician working on the Riemann Hypothesis struggles to establish herself against prejudice in the male-dominated academic world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tiger

by Polly Clark
Drama: A storyline that follows several strands including a traumatized primatologist, a Russian conservationist, and a mother and daughter living isolated in the forest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Crow Trap

by Anne Cleeves
Thriller: A detective investigates murders involving a group of scientists doing an environmental impact assessment.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pandemic

by Robin Cook
Thriller: A forensic pathologist and his medical examiner wife alert authorities when they discover a deadly airborne virus.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Quantum

by Patricia Cornwell
Drama: A NASA pilot, quantum physicist and cybercrime investigator discover sabotage in the run-up to the launch of a top secret project (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Unravelling

by Polly Crosby
Drama: A young woman with no scientific experience becomes an assistant to an old lady who studies butterflies. (In the US, Published as The Women of Pearl Island).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Geometer Lobachevsky

by Adrian Duncan
Drama: In the 1950s a Russian mathematician sent to Ireland to survey a bog fears recall to the Soviet Union that could mean death.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Murmur

by Will Eaves
Drama: An exploration of the consciousness of an Alan Turing-like mathematician who is being ‘treated’ for homosexuality.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Chemical Detective

by Fiona Erskine
Thriller: A chemist who is an explosives expert working on avalanche control is framed for murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields
Historical Fiction/Romance: In 1950, a female physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project is asked to spy on a former colleague and lover by the FBI.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Colonel Lagrimas

by Carlos Fonseca
Drama: The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is working on a final project and reliving his past.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Hidden Bones

by Nichola Ford
Thriller: An archaeologist investigating a lost archive of an excavation uncovers a mysterious death.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger
Drama: An MIT physicist and expert on black holes deals with life as a single mother and grief at losing an old friend.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ankomst

by Gøhril Gabrielsen
Drama: An environmental scientist gathering data on sea-bird populations waits for her lover and questions her choices. (Translated from Norwegian).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus
Drama: A chemist and single mother teaches the housewives of America chemistry in the guise of a cooking programme.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh
Drama/Lablit Lite: A marine biologist studies river dolphins in a novel that connects the Sundarbans in India with Venice.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi
Drama: A young chemist struggles to deal with her depressive mother and memories of her addict brother while working on the science of addiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey
Drama/Lablit Lite: .A young female curator has responsibility for the Natural History Museum’s collections when they are moved out of London for safe-keeping in 1939.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Trinity

by Louisa Hall
Historical Drama: The complex character of Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, is explored through seven characters who encounter him.
Links: Amazon (UK)

V2

by Robert Harris
Historical Thriller: While a team of women mathematicians try to locate the launch sites of V2s, a German rocket scientist who works for Werner von Braun tries to disrupt the programme and evade his Nazi bosses.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Dark

by Emma Haughton
Drama: A doctor who moves to a climate research station in Antarctica after the death of the previous doctor begins to suspect his death was no accident.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Love Hypothesis

by Ali Hazelwood
Romantic Comedy: A final year PhD candidate kisses a professor and they pretend they are having an affair.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Artifact

by Arlene Heyman
Drama: Lottie, pregnant at sixteen, becomes a lab assistant then studies biology in the second half of the 20th century.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Bone Hunter

by Tom Holland
Historical Drama: An amateur palaeontologist from England becomes embroiled with two rival professors fossil hunting in the American west in 1878.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Little Gods

by Meng Jin
Drama: The story of ambitious physicist Su Lan is told by people she knew, as her daughter, born on the night of the Tiananmen Massacre, tries to uncover her past.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Serious Men

by Manu Joseph
Drama: At a research Institute in Mumbai, a lowly assistant makes discoveries about his boss in this satire of Indian society, scientific truth and academic politics.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Miss Benson’s Beetle

by Rachel Joyce
Drama: A spinster obsessed with finding a mythical golden beetle travels to a Pacific island with an unlikely assistant.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poisons

by Kate Khavari
Thriller: London, 1923, and a young female botanist teams up with a colleague to discover who murdered a professor’s wife with an unknown poison.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Soulmate Equation

by Christina Lauren
Romantic Comedy: A numbers genius signs up for a match-making company that claims it can use DNA to find your perfect partner.
Links: Amazon (UK)

My Favorite Half-Night Stand

by Christina Lauren
Romantic Comedy: A criminology professor navigating the peculiarities of online dating has a ‘half-night stand’ with a male friend.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Untraceable

by Sergei Lebedev
Thriller: A Russian chemist who has developed a deadly poison and later defected is hunted by Russian agents determined to eliminate him.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Out of Place

by Diane Lefer
Drama: A research institute in the Mojave Desert and its international group of scientists come under suspicion after 9/11.
Links: Amazon (UK)

When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamin Labatut
Historical Drama: A series of connected stories about scientists and mathematicians, including Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothiendieck, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Anthrax Island

by D.L. Marshall
Thriller: An undercover technician is dispatched to an island formerly used as a biological weapons test site and finds a murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Opposite of a Person

by Lieke Marsman
Drama: A Dutch climatologist leaves her girlfriend in Amsterdam to move to a research institute in the Alps and confronts loneliness and climate change apathy (translated from the Dutch).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Black Sun

by Owen Matthews
Historical Thriller: In the 1960s a KGB officer investigates the death of a brilliant young physicist in a secret research city where nuclear weapons are being developed.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lockdown

by Peter May
Thriller: When a child’s bones are discovered during a deadly flu outbreak, a detective and an odontologist are brought in to investigate, but someone is determined to stop them discovering the truth.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lean Fall Stand

by Jon McGregor
Drama/Lablit Lite a: A small group of scientists meet disaster in a storm when ‘Doc’ has a stroke.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy
Drama: A biologist returning wolves to Scotland finds the body of a dead farmer, but suspicion falls on her love interest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

McKay’s Bees

by Thomas McMahon
Historical Drama: A beekeeper moves to Kansas just before the Civil War and grapples with culture clashes, biology, slavery, creationism and industrialisation.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Carer

by Deborah Moggach
Drama: A couple of squabbling siblings employ a carer to look after their aged retired physics professor father, then start to get suspicious of her.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Night Waking

by Sarah Moss
Drama: A historian who moves to a Scottish island with her ecologist husband discovers the skeleton of a child in the garden.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Warlow Experiment

by Alix Nathan
Historical Drama: In the late 18th century, a man dreams of making a name for himself in the Royal Society by studying a volunteer who is to be walled up for seven years with no daylight.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Botanist’s Daughter

by Kayte Nun
Historical Drama: In the 19th century, a botanist’s daughter travels to Chile to find a very rare plant, while in the present day a gardener finds an old journal – what links them?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Weather

by Jenny Offill
Lablit lite: A college librarian with an addict brother and God-obsessed mother takes on the task of answering email questions from the public about her climate scientist mentor’s podcast.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas
Drama: Great Aunt Oleander is dead, leaving a large family of botanists who have many secrets.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Where the Crawdads Sing

by Delia Owens
Drama: Kya grows up in isolation after her mother and siblings leave and her father dies, but becomes a self-taught naturalist and then is suspected of murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bed Bug

by Katherine Pancol
Drama: A biologist studying insects and their reproduction falls in love. (In French).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tiger in the Dark

by Mary Elwyn Patchett
Children’s Fiction: A zoologist and his son go looking for a surviving marsupial in the outback. (published in 1964).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers
Drama: An astrobiologist and single father tries to keep his mentally damaged but talented son in school and off medication, telling him stories about potential plants that could support life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Volcano Adventure

by Willard Price
Adventure: Hal and Roger Hunt join forces with a famous vulcanologist on a Pacific island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Double Blind

by Edward St Aubyn
Drama: Three friends interact in a story that goes from Sussex to California, encompassing ecology, genetics and neuroscience.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor
Drama: A gay biochemist struggles with work, relationships, issues of race, and his father’s recent death amidst a small group of friends on a Midwest campus.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk
Historical Drama: An International Booker Prize winning book that is not a conventional novel, being both essay and fiction with themes from historical anatomy to migration.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Shoot

by Elleston Trevor
Drama: Missile research scientists on a Pacific island are testing a revolutionary but unstable fuel, but the project is struggling and the countdown for the second launch has begun.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Just the Plague

by Ludmilla Ulitskaya
Drama: A scientist in 1920s Soviet Union inadvertently spreads the plague as secret service agents attempt to track down those with whom he was in contact. (Translated from the Russian).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Land of Marvels

by Barry Unsworth
Historical Thriller/Lablit Lite: An archaeologist and a cast of characters including an oil geologist clash as a great power rivalry plays out in Mesopotamia in 1914.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sanctuary Line

by Sarah Urquhart
Drama: As an entomologist returns to the family farm to study Monarch butterflies, her family history is explored.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Where the Forest Meets the Stars

by Glendy Vanderah
Drama/LabLit Lite: When an ornithologist finds a young girl on her doorstep who claims to be an alien and takes her in, she and her neighbour attempt to discover the truth.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Coldest Warrior

by Paul Vidich
Historical Thriller: At the end of the Korean War, an army bio-weapons scientist dies in a fall from a building, but is it a CIA cover-up? Based on real events.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff
Drama: A sixteen-year-old’s chemistry teacher and lover leaves him his notebooks, which reveal he was searching for an ‘elixir of life’.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Hunt and the Kill

by Holly Watt
Drama: A journalist alerted to the growing threat of antibiotic resistance uncovers evidence of a new antibiotic, and risks her life trying to discover why it is being kept secret.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Spirit Engineer

by A.J. West
Historical Fiction: An engineer and man of science who has been investigating psychics is about to kill himself.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The End of October

by Lawrence Wright
Thriller: A microbiologist working for the WHO investigates an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever that starts to spread on the Hajj and leads to international unrest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The DNA of You and Me

by Andrea Rothman
Romance Drama: A researcher moves to a new lab, only to discover that another scientist is doing work that competes with hers.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Wild Coast

by Lin Anderson
Thriller: A forensic scientist investigating a murder comes under pressure when a young woman goes missing and a colleague is suspected of sexual assault (plus 16 other books in this series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Geneva

by Richard Armitage
Thriller: A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has started to show the same tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s disease as her father – could a new technology save her life?
Links: Amazon (UK)

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The Last Animal

by Ramona Ausubel
Drama: A scientist aiming to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth in Siberia goes rogue when she falls out with colleagues.
Links: Amazon (UK)

First Light

by Charles Baxter
Drama: A tale of the lives of siblings raised in a small Michigan town, an eminent astrophysicist and a quiet, unassuming Buick salesman.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Flashblind

by Paul Bernstein
Drama: A geneticist searching for a cure to his brother’s disorder moves to the Los Alamos Lab, only to find a family link to its dark past.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Blue Skies

by TC Boyle
Thriller/Satire: When Cat gets a pet python, she sets into motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that threaten her survival.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Little Monsters

by Adrienne Brodeur
Drama: A brilliant oceanographer comes off his bipolar disorder medication to make one last scientific breakthrough.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The MIT Murders

by Stephen L. Bruneau
Thriller: When several young women are murdered in the Boston area, a detective investigates links with an Alzheimer’s research biotech company at MIT.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Stone Weta

by Octavia Cade
Drama: With governments denying climate science, scientists around the world are forced to traffic data to save the world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Landfall the Unknown: Lord Howe Island 1788

by Evelyn Cheesman
Historical drama/Children’s fiction: Pioneer female naturalist Evelyn Cheesman based this story on the accidental stranding of botanist John Price on Lord Howe Island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Glidepath

by Arthur C. Clarke
Drama: A tale of scientists working on the first radar ‘talkdown’ equipment during its experimental trials in World War II, written from the author’s personal experience.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The New Life

by Tom Crewe
Drama/Lab lit lite: A novel, based on the lives of real people, that explores homosexuality in the late 19th century. Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Beyond The Door of No Return

by David Diop
Historical fiction: Against a backdrop of colonialism, a botanist in eighteenth century Senegal tries to find a mysterious woman (translated from the French).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Insect Man

by Eleanor Doorly
Children’s fiction: Some English children go to France and learn about the life of the pioneering entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. Based on some real-life events.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Sea Detective

by Mark Douglas-Home
Lab lit lite: An oceanographer uses his knowledge of ocean currents to investigate a murder in Scotland.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Weaver Fish

by Robert Edeson
Thriller: When a linguist, presumed dead, reappears after a balloon crash, his colleagues at the research station are overjoyed, but his discovery throws them all into the path of an international crime ring.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Lady’s Formula for Love

by Elizabeth Everett
Historical/Romance Lab lit lite: Lady Violet Hughes has founded London’s first social club for England’s most brilliant female scientists, but her secret mission for the Crown causes difficulties when she develops feelings for her protection officer (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dr No

by Percival Everett
Thriller/Satire: Maths Professor Wala Kitu, an expert on nothing, tries to foil a villain who has recruited him to apply nothingness to his various crimes.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Whiteout

by Ken Follett
Thriller/Lab lit lite: As a blizzard descends, the director of a pharmaceutical research company has everything riding on his new drug to fight a lethal virus.
Links: Amazon (UK)

My Mechanical Romance

by Alexene Faroll Follmuth
Young adult/Romance/Lab lit lite: When Bel reveals a talent for engineering, she becomes the reluctant new member of the robotics club.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca
Drama/Lab lit lite: A natural history museum curator joins forces with a famous fashion designer, with complicated results.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Brilliant Charming Bastard

by Stella Fosse
Romance: Three female scientists in the San Francisco biotech community end up going out with the same man, who wants to steal their ideas.
Links: >Amazon (UK)

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

by Rivka Galchen
Historical fiction: Celebrated astronomer Johannes Kepler defends his mother when she is accused of witchcraft (some events drawn from real life).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Outbreak

by Frank Gardner
Thriller: An MI6 agent tries to get to the bottom of a deadly outbreak at a British research station in the Arctic.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Agent in Peril

by Alex Gerlis
Thriller: British operatives try to rescue a scientist from Warsaw who has developed important military technology.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Undiscovered Country

by Samantha Gillison
Drama: A relationship breaks down when a couple travels to Papua New Guinea so one of them can do research for a Ph.D. project
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything

by Kara Gnodde
Drama/Romance: A mathematician meddles in her sister’s love life when her formula for love predicts a bad outcome.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Darwin: An Exceptional Voyage

by Fabien Grolleau and Jérémie Royer
Historical Fiction/Graphic novelA fictionalised version of Darwin’s voyage (translated from the French).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Audubon: On the Wings of the World

by Fabien Grolleau and Jérémie Royer
Historical Fiction/Graphic novelA fictionalised version of Audubon’s explorations (translated from the French).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ape House

by Sara Gruen
Drama: A reclusive scientist studying language acquisition in bonobos is disrupted when she meets an investigative journalist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Apollo Murders

by Chris Hadfield
Thriller: Astronauts aboard a fictional Apollo 18 grapple with the Soviets and spies, written by a real-life astronaut.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Orbital

by Samantha Harvey
DramaScientists aboard the International Space Station struggle with the meaning of life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Love Theoretically

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: Two physicist rivals clash against a backdrop of mutual attraction and academic politics.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Loathe to Love You

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: Three novellas featuring female scientists – a civil engineer, an environmental engineer, and an aerospace engineer.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Love on the Brain

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: A scientist working for NASA is assigned to work with her nemesis from grad school.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Revelations

by Eric Hoel
Drama: A famous neuroscientist goes astray when he starts to obsess about the death of one of his colleagues.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Elementary Particles (also known as ‘Atomised’ in some editions)

by Michel Houllebecq
Drama/Lab lit lite: Two brothers, one of them a molecular biologist, take spectacularly different paths in life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Ice Sings Back

by M. Jackson
Thriller: Against a backdrop of environmental peril, three different women search for a missing girl in the mountains of Oregon, unaware of how their stories are linked.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Devil’s Breath

by Jill Johnson
Thriller: A London botanical toxicologist gets accused of murdering someone with one of her poisonous specimens (first of a new series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen
Drama/Lab lit lite: A Ph.D. student struggles to understand his anthropology field study subjects: a group of people in the faraway Faroe Islands.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton

by Philip Kerr
Historical thriller: Isaac Newton is hunting counterfeiters in his job at the Royal Mint, but finds a dead body instead.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya
Drama: A small town community clashes over the proposed erection of a superconducting supercollider.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Icebound (a revised version ‘Prison of Ice’, which he published under the pseudonym David Axton)

by Dean Koontz
Thriller: Scientists try to alleviate drought by importing Arctic ice southward, but the mission is jeopardized by a deadly storm.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Maniac

by Benjamin Labatut
Historical fiction: The life of Hungarian polymath John von Neumann re-imagined.
Links: Amazon (UK)

An Astronomer in Love

by Antoine Laurain
Historical fiction/Romance: A fictional tale featuring Guillaume le Gentil, a real-life astronomer to King Louis XV, and the estate agent who finds his telescope 250 years later.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd
Historical fiction/Lab lit lite: A fictional tale featuring Robert Hooke, member of the 17th century Royal Society, who is called into investigate a ghoulish murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tick Tock

by Simon Mayo
Thriller: A teacher and a vaccinologist grapple with the mysterious implications of an unexplained epidemic of tinnitus in London.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Great Perhaps

by Joe Meno
Drama: The antics of an unusual family, including an animal behavioralist, a paleontologist, a teenage revolutionary and a speechless grandfather.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Plant Hunter

by T. L. Mogford
Drama/Lab lit lite: A man inherits a specimen of a tree reputed to have been last seen by Marco Polo.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Unseen World

by Liz Moore
Drama: A daughter unravels the mystery of her father, a computer scientist succumbing to dementia.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Chance

by Kem Nunn
Thriller/Lab lit lite: A forensic neuropsychologist becomes involved with a female patient whose ex is a terrifying detective.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Everything the Light Touches

by Janice Pariat
Historical fiction: Across time and space, a group of people are strangely connected, including real-life taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on an expedition to the Arctic.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Heresy

by S. J. Parris
Historical fiction: Giordano Bruno is a monk, but also a poet, scientist and magician whom the inquisition has charged with heresy for his astronomical beliefs – but that doesn’t stop Queen Elizabeth I from sending him undercover to discover a potential plot against her (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Curious Death of Peter Artedi

by Theodore Pietsch
Historical fiction: A close friend of Carl Linnaeus drowns under strange circumstances just as he is about to publish his work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Half Life of Valery K

by Natasha Pulley
Historical fiction: In 1963, a former nuclear specialist in a Siberian gulag is recruited to help out in a clandestine Soviet city.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Ice

by John Kare Raake
Thriller: A scientific expedition to the North Pole goes horribly wrong; a brutal killer is on the loose and a fierce storm has the rest of the team trapped. (Translated from Norwegian)
Links: Amazon (UK)

Patience

by Victoria Scott
Drama: Can experimental gene therapy save a nurse’s daughter, or are the stakes too high?
Links: Amazon (UK)

South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby
Comedy: A team of researchers at the South Pole welcome a new member: a climate-change denialist.

Links: Amazon (UK)

Phase Six

by Jim Shepard
Thriller: A deadly global plague originates on the West Coast of Greenland, and scientists race the clock to stop it.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Glory Boys

by Gerald Seymour
Thriller/Lab lit lite: An Israeli nuclear scientist is targeted by a Palestinian terrorist in London.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Fair Botanists

by Sara Sheridan
Historical fiction/Lab lit lite: An Agave Americana plant is about to flower in 19th century Edinburgh, and two independently-minded women take a keen interest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Rosie Result

by Graeme Simison
Comedy/Lab lit lite: Scientist Don and his wife Rosie worry about their son not fitting in at school.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Woodcock

by Richard Smyth
Drama: A naturalist and his wife find their seaside town life turned upside-down when an interloper arrives to build a pier.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sweet Thursday

by John Steinbeck
Drama/Lab lit lite: Following on from the celebrated novel Cannery Row, this lesser-known work follows the lives of various characters in Monterey in the post-war years, including Doc, the informal marine biologist of the community.
Links: Amazon (UK)

They Know Not What They Do

by Jussi Valtonen
Thriller: A neuroscientist grapples with animal rights activists, leading to a reunion with a son he abandoned decades previously.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Chemistry of Love

by Sariah Wilson
Romance: A female chemist in the cosmetics industry falls for her boss.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Golden Age

by Wang Xiaobo
Drama/Lab lit lite: A biology lecturer in a Beijing university leads a complicated life (translated from the Chinese).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Murder of Crows

by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett
Thriller: An ecologist is forced to act as her own detective when she’s named as the prime suspect in a murder (first of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Natural History: Stories

by Andrea Barrett
Drama: Short stories and a novella that link characters in some of previous works from the Civil War to the present.
Links: Book Amazon (UK)

Endangered

by Pamela Beason
Drama: Biologist and writer Sam Westin is in Utah to report on the cougar population when a child goes missing and disrupts her mission (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Game with Sharpened Knives

by Neil Belton
Drama: Living in exile in Dublin, physicist Schrodinger is haunted by his past and present (based on some real-life events).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict
Drama: Mitza Maric, a brilliant physicist in her own right, gets lost in Einstein’s shadow (inspired by real-life events).
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Bone Hunters

by Joanne Burn
Historical fiction: A poor but educated girl who finds fossils of an ancient creature in the Dorset cliffs and comes into contact with an ambitious geologist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Woman With the Cure

by Lynn Cullen
Historical fiction: Dorothy Horstmann may be the only female doctor in the room, but she is determined to help find a cure for polio (based on real-life events).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Love and the Platypus

by Nicholas Drayson
Historical Drama: A 19th Century naturalist trying to discover if the platypus really does lay eggs enlists the help of local Aboriginal people.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Accidentals

by Susan M Gaines
Drama: Returning to Uruguay with his mother, Gabriel falls in love with a local biologist, and is faced with environmental cataclysm.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Alchemist

by Peter James
Thriller: When a Nobel prize-winning geneticist sells his company to big pharma, a terrible revelation coms to light.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Radiance

by Louis B. Jones
Drama: A once an eminent physicist, ill with Lyme Disease, gets arrested on a night out with his daughter. (Sequel to Particles and Luck)
Links: Amazon (UK)

Constellations: A Scientific Story

by Russell McCormmach
Drama: An astrophysicist confronts challenges in her personal and professional lives.
Links: Amazon (UK)

To Catch a Storm

by Mindy Mejia
Crime: When the husband of a physicist disappears, she reluctantly teams up with a man who claims to be a psychic. (First of a series)
Links: Amazon (UK)

Nervous System

by Lina Meruane
Drama: An astrophysicist is consumed by her inability to finish writing her Ph.D. and a seemingly undiagnosed illness. (Translated from Spanish).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Rosalind

by Jessica Mills
Historical fiction: Based on the life of Rosalind Franklin, who has to assert herself as a scientist in a man’s world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dead Flowers

by Nicola Monaghan
Thriller: DNA expert Dr. Sian Love finds two bodies in her home. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Column of Smoke

by Rebecca Nesbit
Drama: A young ambitious scientist is passionate about her research on genetically modified crops, but when activists destroy a field trial, she is threatened with the loss of both her career and friendships.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Azucar

by Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Drama: A scientist travels to a Caribbean island to rescue the local rice crops.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Dolphin House

by Audrey Schulman
Drama: In 1965 ,a deaf woman protects dolphins that are the subject of scientific experiments.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Never Closer

by Margot Shepherd
Drama: A woman discovers an old diary that links her with a junior lab-worker in the 1940s.
Links: Book Amazon (UK)

Digging Stars

by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Drama: In an elite science programme at an American university, Rosa confronts the legacy of her astronomer father.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Reproduction

by Louisa Hall
Drama: A woman grappling with pregnancy loss and attempting to write a book about Mary Shelley comes back into contact with an old biochemist friend.
Links: Amazon (UK)

How I Won a Nobel Prize: A Novel

by Julius Taranto
Comedy/satire: A famous physicist is ‘cancelled’ and faces being a victim of culture wars.
Links: Amazon (UK)

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