Reading List

Authors Like Dava Sobel

In 1707 a British fleet ran aground off the Isles of Scilly, and seven years later the government offered a prize to anyone who could find longitude at sea. Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1995) tells how an eighteenth-century clockmaker, John Harrison, set out to win it. For Galileo’s Daughter (1999) she translated the 124 surviving letters that Suor Maria Celeste wrote to her father from the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, where she had lived since she was 13. Then came the women of the Harvard Observatory in The Glass Universe (2016), and the at least 45 women who worked in Marie Curie’s laboratory in The Elements of Marie Curie (2024). The ten writers below share her method and her subject: science told through letters, archives and lives, and the people standing just outside the famous name.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Popular science · History of astronomy · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Dava Sobel, start with Andrea Wulf, whose Chasing Venus (2012) follows the race to measure the heavens. For the women behind the calculations, read Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016), published the same year as The Glass Universe, and for Marie Curie written by her own daughter, Ève Curie’s Madame Curie (1937). Further down is a Harvard historian who thinks the heroic story of science is too simple.

10 authors like Dava Sobel

01
Astronomy for the curious, in 1686

Bernard de Fontenelle

French · Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686)

Fontenelle was born in Rouen in 1657 and died in Paris in 1757, aged 99. His Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes is a series of evening conversations in a garden between a narrator and a marquise, explaining the Copernican system and speculating about life on other worlds; a sixth evening was added in 1687. Aphra Behn translated it into English in 1688 as A Discovery of New Worlds.

The ancestor of every book Sobel has written: the newest astronomy explained to a reader with no training, with charm rather than equations. It pairs naturally with The Planets and A More Perfect Heaven.

— Lisanne
02
A daughter writes the scientist

Ève Curie

French-born American · Madame Curie (1937), Journey Among Warriors (1943)

Ève Curie was born in Paris in 1904, the younger daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie. Her biography of her mother won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1937. She later worked as a war correspondent and for UNICEF, became an American citizen in 1958 and died in New York in 2007, aged 102.

Galileo’s Daughter in reverse: a scientist seen by her own child. Read it before or after The Elements of Marie Curie; Sobel’s book widens the frame to the women of the laboratory, while Ève Curie stays inside the family.

— Lisanne
03
The planets as places

Carl Sagan

American · The Dragons of Eden (1977), Cosmos (1980), Pale Blue Dot (1994)

Sagan (1934–1996) was an astronomer and the presenter of the 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, whose companion book became Cosmos. The Dragons of Eden won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1978. He helped put together the Voyager Golden Record, sent into space on the Voyager probes in 1977.

The closest match to The Planets: the solar system written with wonder for readers who are not scientists. The difference is that Sagan was a working scientist describing his own field, while Sobel is a reporter of other people’s discoveries.

— Lisanne

Every book by Carl Sagan →

04
When science was Romantic

Richard Holmes

British · Footsteps (1985), The Age of Wonder (2008)

Holmes was born in London in 1945 and is the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science follows the scientific ferment in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, the first ideas of deep time and deep space, and their effect on writers such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats.

Holmes shares Sobel’s method, science told as the lives of the people who made it, and adds the poets who were watching. He suits readers who loved the letters in Galileo’s Daughter and want the same intimacy more than a century later.

— Lisanne
05
Measuring the heavens

Andrea Wulf

German-British · Chasing Venus (2012), The Invention of Nature (2015), Magnificent Rebels (2022)

Wulf was born in New Delhi in 1967. Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens is an eighteenth-century story of astronomy and measurement. The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt, won the Costa Biography Award and the Royal Society science book prize. Her newest book, The Traveller (2026), is a life of the explorer George Forster.

The nearest book to Longitude: an eighteenth-century problem of measurement and the people who staked their careers on solving it. Wulf writes with the same clarity and a wider European cast.

— Lisanne
06
The other human computers

Margot Lee Shetterly

American · Hidden Figures (2016)

Shetterly was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1969; her father worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Hidden Figures tells the story of the African American women mathematicians who worked at NASA and contributed to the American space programme. The 2016 film, with Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, received three Oscar nominations.

Published in the same year as The Glass Universe, and on the same subject seen from a later century: women doing the calculations behind a famous scientific project and kept out of its history. Shetterly adds race to the story Sobel tells about sex.

— Lisanne
07
Marie Curie, drawn

Lauren Redniss

American · Century Girl (2006), Radioactive (2010), Thunder & Lightning (2015)

Redniss was born in 1974 and is an artist and writer. Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout was a National Book Award finalist in 2011, the first work of visual nonfiction to be recognised that way, and was filmed in 2019 by Marjane Satrapi with Rosamund Pike. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.

The same Curie as The Elements of Marie Curie, told in images as much as words, and more interested in the long afterlife of radioactivity. It suits readers who want science history that looks as strange as it is.

— Lisanne
08
Precision as a story

Simon Winchester

British-American · The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998), The Map That Changed the World (2001), The Perfectionists (2018)

Winchester was born in London in 1944 and became an American citizen in 2011. The Surgeon of Crowthorne was published in the United States as The Professor and the Madman. The Perfectionists, also published as Exactly, is a history of how precision engineers created the modern world. His most recent book is The Breath of the Gods (2025), about the wind.

Longitude is a book about exactness, and The Perfectionists is its long sequel: the history of making things measure true. Winchester shares Sobel’s love of the obsessive individual and is the more digressive storyteller.

— Lisanne

Every book by Simon Winchester →

09
Against the lone genius

Steven Shapin

American · Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985, with Simon Schaffer), The Scientific Revolution (1996)

Shapin was born in New York in 1943 and is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard. The Scientific Revolution begins: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” His most recent book is Eating and Being (2024), a history of ideas about food.

The book to read once you have finished Sobel. Historians of science criticised Longitude for heroes, villains and rival methods; Shapin is the academic voice for the opposite view, in which science is collective, social and slow. Short, sceptical and very clear.

— Lisanne
10
All of science, lightly

Bill Bryson

American-British · A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), At Home (2010), The Body (2019)

Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951 and became a British citizen in 2014. A Short History of Nearly Everything won the Aventis Prize for science books in 2004 and the EU’s Descartes Prize for science communication in 2005. The Body: A Guide for Occupants followed in 2019.

Bryson shares Sobel’s gift for the scientist’s life as anecdote, though he moves faster and plays it for laughs. It suits readers who want the whole sweep of science in one book rather than one discovery told in depth.

— Lisanne

Every book by Bill Bryson →

Where to start if you loved Dava Sobel

If you loved Longitude, read Andrea Wulf.

Chasing Venus (2012): eighteenth-century astronomers racing to measure the heavens.

If you loved The Glass Universe, read Margot Lee Shetterly.

Hidden Figures (2016): the women mathematicians behind the American space programme.

If you loved The Elements of Marie Curie, read Ève Curie.

Madame Curie (1937): her mother’s life, written by her younger daughter.

If you loved The Planets, read Carl Sagan.

Pale Blue Dot (1994): the solar system and our place in it.

If you want more Sobel, read Galileo’s Daughter next.

Then Letters to Father (2001), her translations of Maria Celeste’s letters with the Italian on facing pages, and A More Perfect Heaven (2011), on Copernicus.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Dava Sobel

Who writes like Dava Sobel?

Andrea Wulf, Margot Lee Shetterly and Ève Curie are the closest. Wulf writes eighteenth-century science as an international race, Shetterly the women behind the calculations, and Ève Curie the life of her mother, Marie Curie.

What should I read after Longitude?

Andrea Wulf’s Chasing Venus (2012), another eighteenth-century race to measure the heavens, and Simon Winchester’s The Perfectionists (2018), a history of precision engineering.

What should I read after The Glass Universe?

Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016), about the African American women mathematicians who worked at NASA.

Is Longitude historically accurate?

Historians of science have criticised it for casting heroes and villains, for presenting the astronomical and timekeeping methods as rivals rather than complementary, and for simplifying how invention works. Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution (1996) is a short introduction to that more sceptical view.

Does Dava Sobel have a new book?

No new book has been announced as of October 2026. Her most recent is The Elements of Marie Curie (2024), about Curie and the at least 45 women who worked in her laboratory.

Which Dava Sobel book should I read first?

Longitude (1995) is the best known and the easiest way in. Galileo’s Daughter (1999), a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, is the richer book.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 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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