Reading List

Authors Like David Grann

In 2016 Grann was going through a British archive looking into mutinies when he found a journal written in stilted eighteenth-century prose by John Byron, a sixteen-year-old midshipman and the future grandfather of the poet. Byron had sailed on HMS Wager, which wrecked off Patagonia in 1741; of roughly 250 men who set out, a few dozen made it home, and they came back with irreconcilable accounts of what had happened on the island. Some were charged with mutiny, which carried a death sentence, so the accounts were not merely different, they were survival strategies. The Wager (2023) spends two years in archives, one boat trip to Wager Island, and then gives you three competing versions and declines to arbitrate. That is the Grann method: The Lost City of Z (2009) on Percy Fawcett vanishing into the Amazon, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) on the murders of Osage people for their oil rights, The White Darkness (2018) on a man walking into Antarctica alone. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003, and six of his books or articles have been adapted for the screen, including Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. The ten below are chosen on how they handle an archive and what they do with the gaps in it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Narrative non-fiction · Archives and obsession · Six screen adaptations · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love David Grann, the closest match is Hampton Sides: expeditions that went badly wrong, reconstructed from logbooks and letters with the same forward pull. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is the direct maritime ancestor of The Wager, and Alfred Lansing's Endurance is the book the whole genre is measured against. Erik Larson and Candice Millard work the same archival seam, and Patrick Radden Keefe the modern investigative one. And David Treuer is the argument against the vantage point of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Every book by David Grann →

10 authors like David Grann

01
The expedition that went wrong · Closest match

Hampton Sides

American · Ghost Soldiers (2001), In the Kingdom of Ice (2014), The Wide Wide Sea (2024)

In the Kingdom of Ice follows the USS Jeannette, sent north in 1879 on the theory that a warm open sea lay at the pole, and what happened when the ship was crushed by ice and the crew walked out across Siberia. Ghost Soldiers reconstructs the 1945 raid on a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines. The Wide Wide Sea covers Captain Cook's final voyage and his death in Hawaii, and is unusually direct about what the voyages meant for the people Cook encountered.

The nearest match on the shelf and the most reliable next book. Sides does what Grann does — take an expedition that collapsed, work from logbooks, letters and testimony, and structure it so a reader forgets they already know how it ends — and he has done it half a dozen times. He is more conventional in his sympathies and less interested in competing versions of the truth, which is Grann's real subject in The Wager.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hampton Sides →

02
The shipwreck that became Moby-Dick

Nathaniel Philbrick

American · In the Heart of the Sea (2000), Mayflower (2006)

In the Heart of the Sea is the whaleship Essex, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820, and the ninety-odd days its crew spent in open boats afterwards, during which they resorted to eating their dead and then to drawing lots. It won the National Book Award and Ron Howard filmed it in 2015. Philbrick built it from the first mate's narrative and, crucially, from a cabin boy's account discovered in an attic more than a century later.

The book The Wager is in direct conversation with, and the one to read immediately before or after. Same century, same ocean, same problem: several survivors, several accounts, and a version that was published because it was the one people could bear. Philbrick is more interested in the physiology of starvation and Grann in the politics of the story that follows. Together they are the definitive pair on how the sea produces unreliable narrators.

— Lisanne
03
Older than the genre · The standard

Alfred Lansing

American · Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage (1959)

Lansing interviewed surviving members of Shackleton's 1914 expedition and worked from their diaries to reconstruct the loss of the Endurance in the Weddell Sea ice, the months on floes, the open-boat crossing to South Georgia and the walk over its mountains. The book was largely forgotten for decades before becoming a permanent bestseller. The wreck itself was located on the Antarctic seabed in 2022, almost exactly where the ship's captain had recorded it sinking.

The book every writer on this list has read, including Grann. Lansing established the form: a documented catastrophe, a small group under unbearable pressure, no invented dialogue, and prose that gets out of the way. It is also the cheerful counter-example to The Wager — the Shackleton party held together where the Wager castaways came apart, and reading the two side by side is the best available argument about what actually determines which way a group goes.

— Lisanne
04
Two threads, converging

Erik Larson

American · Isaac's Storm (1999), The Devil in the White City (2003), Dead Wake (2015)

Larson builds books by running two documented stories toward each other: the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the murderer operating beside it, the Lusitania and the U-boat, the Galveston hurricane and the weather bureau chief who did not believe it was coming. Everything comes from letters, telegrams, testimony and logbooks, and the suspense is manufactured entirely out of what the reader knows and the characters do not.

The other great practitioner of archival suspense, and the closest to Grann in commercial reach. The difference is temperament: Larson wants the collision and the dread, where Grann keeps stopping to ask which account we are believing and why. If you want more of the pure page-turning quality of Killers of the Flower Moon, start with Dead Wake. If you want more of the epistemology of The Wager, go elsewhere on this list.

— Lisanne

Every book by Erik Larson →

Authors like Erik Larson →

05
Presidents, rivers and disasters

Candice Millard

American · The River of Doubt (2005), Destiny of the Republic (2011), River of the Gods (2022)

The River of Doubt follows Theodore Roosevelt, freshly defeated in the 1912 election, onto an uncharted Amazon tributary that nearly killed him. Destiny of the Republic is the shooting of President Garfield and the doctors whose refusal to accept antisepsis did most of the actual killing. River of the Gods is Burton and Speke searching for the source of the Nile, and gives serious attention to Sidi Mubarak Bombay, the formerly enslaved guide without whom neither would have got anywhere.

The same instinct for the expedition as a test of character, with more attention to the people the famous names depended on. Millard is a former National Geographic editor and it shows in the geography; she is also the closest of these writers to Grann in pacing, producing books of about the same length that read at about the same speed. The River of Doubt is the natural next book after The Lost City of Z.

— Lisanne
06
The modern investigation

Patrick Radden Keefe

American · Say Nothing (2018), Empire of Pain (2021), Rogues (2022)

Say Nothing uses one abduction in Belfast in 1972 to tell the Troubles through the people who carried it out, and ends by pursuing an answer nobody involved wanted given; FX adapted it in 2024. Empire of Pain is three generations of the Sackler family and the marketing of OxyContin. Rogues collects twelve of his magazine profiles, which is the closest thing in print to a Grann collection by someone else.

What Grann does with dead archives, done with living sources and lawyers. Both writers structure a book as a question and withhold the answer until the reader has been made to want it badly; both are more interested in how a version of events becomes official than in the events themselves. Keefe faces the problem Grann mostly does not, which is that his subjects can sue. Read Say Nothing after Killers of the Flower Moon.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patrick Radden Keefe →

Authors like Patrick Radden Keefe →

07
The wreck, and the men obsessed with it

Robert Kurson

American · Shadow Divers (2004), Pirate Hunters (2015), Rocket Men (2018)

Shadow Divers follows two amateur divers who found an unidentified German U-boat sixty miles off New Jersey in 1991 and spent six years, at considerable cost, establishing which one it was — a search that took them into archives in Germany and cost three divers their lives. Pirate Hunters is a search for a seventeenth-century pirate ship in the Caribbean; Rocket Men is Apollo 8.

Grann's subject exactly: people who cannot let a historical question go, and what it costs them. Kurson is less literary and more propulsive, and he is very good on the technical world of the obsessives — the decompression tables, the archive requests, the marriages that do not survive it. If “my fascination with obsession” is the phrase that made you nod while reading Grann, this is the book.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Kurson →

Authors like Robert Kurson →

08
The archive, from Britain

Ben Macintyre

British · Agent Zigzag (2007), Operation Mincemeat (2010), The Spy and the Traitor (2018)

Macintyre works from declassified British and Soviet files and writes espionage as character study: a safecracker turned double agent, a corpse dressed as a Royal Marine to mislead the Germans about Sicily, Kim Philby and the friend who could not see it, and Oleg Gordievsky's escape from Moscow in a car boot. He is a columnist at The Times, and several of the books have been filmed.

The British equivalent of the Grann archive habit, applied to the twentieth century. Both writers get their effects from documents nobody else bothered to read properly and from a refusal to smooth over the parts that make no sense. Macintyre is funnier and more forgiving of his rogues; Grann is more interested in why the official record says what it says. Read Operation Mincemeat for the pleasure of watching a plan work.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ben Macintyre →

09
The polar expedition, unravelling

Julian Sancton

American · Madhouse at the End of the Earth (2021)

The Belgica set out in 1897 to reach the South Magnetic Pole and was trapped in the ice for a full Antarctic winter, the first ship to endure one. Sancton reconstructs the darkness, the scurvy, the madness that took hold of the crew, and the two men who got them out: the young Roald Amundsen and the ship's American doctor, Frederick Cook, who was later disgraced over a claim to have reached the North Pole.

The closest thing published this decade to a Grann book by someone else. A confined group, a documented catastrophe, an archive in several languages, and a crew whose accounts of the same winter do not match. Sancton also has what The Wager has: a survivor who becomes famous and a survivor who becomes a liar, and no comfortable way to tell them apart. Read it straight after The Wager.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against him

David Treuer

American, Ojibwe · Rez Life (2012), The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019)

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee takes as its starting point that Native American history is usually written as an ending — the massacre of 1890 as a full stop — and sets out to write the twelve decades since as a story of survival, law, politics and ordinary life. It was a National Book Award finalist and won the Carnegie Medal for non-fiction. Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, is a novelist as well as a historian, and teaches at the University of Southern California.

The corrective to the vantage point of Killers of the Flower Moon. Grann's book is superb and its subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which tells you whose arrival supplies the structure; Osage readers and Native critics have pointed out that the investigation belongs to the outsiders while the community is largely acted upon. Treuer writes the same century from inside it, with Native people as the subject rather than the case. Read him after Grann, not instead of him.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved David Grann

If you want the closest match, read Hampton Sides.

In the Kingdom of Ice. A ship sent north on a wrong theory, and the walk out of Siberia.

If you loved The Wager, read Nathaniel Philbrick.

In the Heart of the Sea. The whaleship Essex, and the account nobody wanted published.

If you want the book the genre is measured against, read Alfred Lansing.

Endurance. The same catastrophe logic, with a group that held together.

If you want it again this decade, read Julian Sancton.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth. One Antarctic winter, and a crew that came apart.

If you want the argument against him, read David Treuer.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. The same century, written from inside it.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like David Grann

Who should I read if I love David Grann?

Hampton Sides is the closest — the same collapsed expedition rebuilt from logbooks and letters. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is the direct ancestor of The Wager and Alfred Lansing's Endurance is the standard the whole genre works against. Erik Larson and Candice Millard share the archival method, Julian Sancton has written the nearest thing to a Grann book this decade, and Robert Kurson is the specialist in obsessives. Patrick Radden Keefe is the modern investigative equivalent and Ben Macintyre the British one. David Treuer is the argument against the vantage point of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Which David Grann book should I start with?

The Wager (2023) if you want the best-constructed one: a shipwreck off Patagonia in 1741, castaways who came home with irreconcilable accounts, and a court martial where the wrong version meant hanging. Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) if you want the most important: the Osage murders of the 1920s and the money behind them. The Lost City of Z (2009) is the most purely adventurous. The White Darkness (2018) is short, illustrated and can be read in an evening.

Is David Grann writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. His books have appeared roughly every three to six years and he remains a staff writer at The New Yorker, where most of them began as articles. The Wager, published in April 2023, is the most recent.

Is The Wager being made into a film?

It has been in development since before publication. Apple Original Films bought the rights, with Martin Scorsese attached to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star and produce — their second Grann adaptation after Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese has since said publicly that it is his next feature, while also noting that shooting on water is complicated enough that the schedule is uncertain. No release date has been set. Options and announcements frequently outrun actual production, so treat it as likely rather than imminent.

What is the criticism of Killers of the Flower Moon?

That the frame belongs to the outsiders. The subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and the book's structure follows the investigation, which means the Osage largely appear as victims and witnesses in a story organised around the arrival of federal agents. Grann added a final section drawing on Osage descendants and archives, and Scorsese restructured the film substantially in response to similar objections. The reasonable response is not to skip the book but to read David Treuer or Osage writers alongside it.

What actually happened to the Wager?

HMS Wager was part of a British squadron sent in 1740 to seize a Spanish treasure galleon. It wrecked off the coast of Patagonia in 1741. Of roughly 250 men who set out on the ship, a few dozen eventually reached England, arriving in separate groups months apart and with contradictory accounts — one party accusing the other of mutiny, which was a capital offence. The court martial that followed was less about what happened on the island than about whose version would be accepted.

How does David Grann do his research?

Archives first, for years. He found The Wager in 2016 while going through a British archive on mutinies, in the journal of a sixteen-year-old midshipman, and spent about two years in records before writing — logbooks, muster books, court-martial transcripts, Admiralty reports, correspondence, sea ballads and drawings. He then went to Wager Island in Patagonia, having admitted he dislikes camping. He has described the island as functioning almost like a laboratory for testing human nature.

Why do so many of his books become films?

Because they are structured like films already: one obsession, a clear question, a confined setting and an ending that turns. Six of his books or articles have been adapted, including The Lost City of Z (2016), The Old Man & the Gun (2018) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), with The Wager and The White Darkness in development. It is worth reading the books first: the adaptations necessarily resolve ambiguities that Grann deliberately leaves open.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Almost like a laboratory, testing human nature under extraordinary circumstances.”

— David Grann, on the castaways of the Wager.

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