Authors Like Bill Bryson

Mary Roach

American · Stiff (2003), Packing for Mars (2010), Gulp (2013)

Roach picks a subject most writers avoid and reports it properly: what happens to donated bodies, in Stiff; the digestive tract from mouth to exit, in Gulp; the unglamorous engineering of keeping humans alive in orbit, in Packing for Mars; wildlife that breaks the law, in Fuzz. She goes to the labs, watches the procedures, asks the questions everybody else is too embarrassed to ask, and keeps the footnotes as funny as the text.

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Tim Moore

British · French Revolutions (2001), Gironimo! (2014), Another Fine Mess (2018)

Moore sets himself a stupid physical task and then completes it while complaining beautifully: riding the entire route of the Tour de France on his own before the professionals do it, riding the brutal 1914 Giro d'Italia route on a wooden-wheeled bicycle of the period in period wool, driving a thirty-year-old Model T Ford through the American states that voted for Trump. The research underneath the comedy is real, and the suffering is genuine.

Michael Palin

British · Around the World in 80 Days (1989), Himalaya (2004), Erebus (2018)

After Monty Python, Palin spent three decades making travel series and writing the books alongside them: circling the globe without flying, pole to pole, the Sahara, the Himalaya, North Korea. Erebus is different and better than expected — a biography of the ship that went to Antarctica with Ross and then disappeared into the Arctic with Franklin. His published diaries run to several volumes and are unusually honest about the boredom and vanity of the job. He was knighted in 2019.

Paul Theroux

American · The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Dark Star Safari (2002)

Theroux took trains from London to Japan and back for The Great Railway Bazaar and effectively restarted the travel book as a form: no monuments, mostly conversations, and a narrator who is bored, uncomfortable and sharp about the people he meets. Dark Star Safari is an overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town that is very hard on the aid industry. He also wrote The Mosquito Coast and a famously unsparing memoir of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul.

Eric Newby

British · The Last Grain Race (1956), A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)

Newby was working in the fashion trade when he wired a friend in the Foreign Office proposing they climb a mountain in Nuristan, having had four days of rock-climbing instruction in Wales between them. The book that came out of it is the founding text of the incompetent-Englishman-abroad tradition, and it ends with the pair meeting the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who watches them inflate their air mattresses and calls them a couple of pansies. Newby had earlier sailed on one of the last grain ships and escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy.

Sarah Vowell

American · Assassination Vacation (2005), Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015)

Vowell drives around the United States visiting the sites, museums and gift shops associated with presidential assassinations, and turns it into a history of American political violence that is genuinely funny about how a country memorialises its worst days. She was a regular contributor to This American Life for years, which is where the voice comes from, and she voiced Violet in Pixar's The Incredibles.

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Authors like Sarah Vowell →

Simon Winchester

British-American · The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998), The Map That Changed the World (2001), Krakatoa (2003)

Winchester trained as a geologist and worked as a foreign correspondent before writing narrative histories built around a single object or project: the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and the murderer in Broadmoor who was one of its most prolific contributors; William Smith's first geological map of England; the 1883 eruption that was heard three thousand miles away. He has written more than thirty books and was made an OBE in 2006.

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Ed Yong

British-American · I Contain Multitudes (2016), An Immense World (2022)

An Immense World works through what animals actually perceive — the electrical fields a fish reads, the magnetic sense of a robin, what a dog gets from a lamp post — and argues that every species lives inside its own sensory bubble. I Contain Multitudes does the same for the microbes we carry. Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2021 for his coverage of the pandemic at The Atlantic.

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Jon Ronson

British · Them (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015)

Ronson spends time with extremists, conspiracists, psychiatrists and people whose lives have been destroyed by a single social media post, and reports it as an anxious, self-doubting participant rather than an authority. The Men Who Stare at Goats, on American military experiments with the paranormal, became a 2009 film with George Clooney. He has since made several long-running documentary podcast series.

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Authors like Jon Ronson →

Robert Macfarlane

British · The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), Underland (2019)

Macfarlane writes about walking, mountains and what is beneath them in prose that takes itself entirely seriously: old paths and sea roads in The Old Ways, the vocabulary regional English has for landscape in Landmarks, and in Underland caves, catacombs, glacier moulins and a Finnish repository built to hold nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. He teaches at Cambridge and has campaigned on the loss of nature words from children's dictionaries.

Every book by Robert Macfarlane →