Author Guide ·
Books Written by
Roach writes popular science built entirely around a single method: pick a subject everyone is too squeamish or too polite to ask about directly — corpses, sex, digestion, space travel — and go find the scientists who study it anyway. Her books are funny in a way most science writing isn’t, but the humor is never a substitute for the reporting; she shows up to the labs, the cadaver studies, the zero-gravity flights, in person.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Popular Science · Updated August 2026
Popular ScienceOn my shelf
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Roach’s first and most famous book follows what actually happens to human bodies donated to science — car-crash testing, decomposition research, surgical practice, and the long, strange history of what medicine has done with the dead. It is funny, genuinely informative, and more respectful of its subjects than the premise suggests.
The chapter on decomposition research at the University of Tennessee’s ‘body farm’ is the one most people remember, but the historical material on grave-robbing and early anatomy is just as sharp.
Popular Science
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Roach investigates the scientific attempts, historical and current, to find evidence of an afterlife — reincarnation researchers, ghost hunters, mediums, and the physicists who tried to weigh the soul. She approaches all of it with the same skeptical curiosity, neither debunking on principle nor believing on faith.
Less structurally tight than Stiff, but the chapters on early 20th-century ‘soul weighing’ experiments are some of the strangest science history you’ll read.
Popular Science
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
A history and current survey of sex research — from Masters and Johnson’s original lab studies to the more obscure and often absurd experiments that followed. Roach treats it as she treats every subject: with genuine scientific curiosity and zero embarrassment.
The book works best as a demonstration of how difficult and underfunded a research area sex science actually is, despite obvious universal interest.
Popular Science · Space
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
The unglamorous physical realities of space travel — how astronauts eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and stay sane in confinement — researched through NASA archives, isolation-study volunteers, and interviews with astronauts themselves.
A useful corrective to the romanticism of space exploration; Roach is interested in the plumbing and psychology, not the mythology, and the book is funnier for it.
Popular Science
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
A tour of the human digestive system from mouth to the other end, covering taste science, competitive eating, gut bacteria, and the surprisingly recent history of understanding what actually happens to food inside us.
One of her tightest books structurally — the digestive tract gives her a natural beginning-to-end narrative shape that some of her other subjects lack.
