Reading List

Authors Like Sy Montgomery

In March 2011 Montgomery drove from New Hampshire to the New England Aquarium to meet Athena, a forty-pound, five-foot giant Pacific octopus. The lid came off the tank and the animal turned red, slid over and reached for her; she pushed both arms into the fifty-seven-degree water and was covered in suckers, and where she stroked the octopus's head the skin turned pale, which is the colour of a contented octopus. The essay she wrote about it, “Deep Intellect” in Orion, is still the most-read piece that magazine has ever published. Athena died soon afterwards. Montgomery kept going back, got to know Octavia, Kali and Karma, and out of that came The Soul of an Octopus (2015), a National Book Award finalist for non-fiction, translated into thirteen languages. She has written thirty-eight books for adults and children — The Good Good Pig (2006) about the runt she raised for fourteen years, How to Be a Good Creature (2018), Secrets of the Octopus for National Geographic in March 2024 — and the New York Times has called her one of the finest chroniclers of the natural world. Her own account of what the octopuses did to her is plain: they changed her way of living on the planet. The ten below are chosen on how they treat an animal as somebody rather than something.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Nature writing · Animals as individuals · 38 books · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Sy Montgomery, the closest match is Helen Macdonald — reviewers said The Soul of an Octopus does for the octopus what H is for Hawk did for raptors, and they were right. For the philosophy behind it, read Peter Godfrey-Smith, whom Montgomery recommends herself, and Carl Safina on what animals think and feel. Gerald Durrell is the ancestor of writing animals as characters. And Hal Herzog is the argument against her: he asks why we love one animal and eat another.

Every book by Sy Montgomery →

10 authors like Sy Montgomery

01
The comparison reviewers made · Closest match

Helen Macdonald

British · H is for Hawk (2014), Vesper Flights (2020)

H is for Hawk is about training a goshawk after the sudden death of her father, braided with the life of T. H. White, who trained one badly and wrote about it in 1951. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2014. Vesper Flights collects shorter essays on swifts, nests, hares, mushrooms and the strange business of watching wildlife at all. She has worked as a falconer, a historian of science and a research fellow at Cambridge.

The comparison the reviews reached for when The Soul of an Octopus appeared, and it holds. Both writers build a book on a sustained relationship with one difficult animal, both refuse to pretend the relationship is scientific detachment, and both are writing about grief underneath the natural history. Macdonald is the harder, more literary writer; Montgomery is the warmer and more companionable. Read H is for Hawk next.

— Lisanne

Every book by Helen Macdonald →

Authors like Helen Macdonald →

02
The philosophy she recommends

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Australian · Other Minds (2016), Metazoa (2020)

Other Minds is a philosopher of science, and keen diver, working out what an octopus is: a creature whose most recent common ancestor with us was probably a flattened worm six hundred million years ago, with most of its neurons in its arms, and which nonetheless behaves in ways that look unmistakably like curiosity. Metazoa traces the emergence of subjective experience across animal life more broadly. He teaches at the University of Sydney.

The rigorous companion to her book, and Montgomery has recommended it publicly herself. She establishes through years of contact that an octopus has a personality; he asks what would have to be true for that to be more than a story we tell. Read them together in either order — the pairing is the single best thing on this page, because each supplies exactly what the other leaves out.

— Lisanne
03
What animals think and feel

Carl Safina

American · Song for the Blue Ocean (1997), Beyond Words (2015), Becoming Wild (2020)

Beyond Words follows elephants in Kenya, wolves in Yellowstone and killer whales in the Pacific Northwest, and argues from the field observations that these animals grieve, plan, hold grudges and teach. Becoming Wild is about animal culture — what a sperm whale or a macaw learns from its own society rather than from its genes. He founded the Safina Center and has taught at Stony Brook University.

The same argument with more animals and more science behind it. Safina spends his book doing what Montgomery does in one aquarium: reporting behaviour that only makes sense if the animal has an interior life, and refusing to apologise for saying so. He is more systematic and less personal — there is no equivalent of her grief when an octopus dies. Read Beyond Words if you want the case made at length.

— Lisanne
04
What the animal can actually perceive

Ed Yong

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

An Immense World works through what animals actually detect — the electrical fields a fish reads, the infrared a rattlesnake sees, what a dog gets from a lamp post — and argues that every species lives inside its own sensory bubble, the Umwelt. It won the Royal Society's science book prize and the Carnegie Medal. Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2021 for his pandemic coverage at The Atlantic.

The check on the whole enterprise, offered kindly. Montgomery meets an octopus and reports what passed between them; Yong spends four hundred pages establishing how differently other creatures perceive, which makes the encounter both more plausible and more mysterious. An octopus tastes with its arms, which means her hand in the tank was being read in a way she cannot experience. Read him second and her book gets stranger.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ed Yong →

Authors like Ed Yong →

05
The same wonder, sharper edges

Lulu Miller

American · Why Fish Don't Exist (2020)

Miller sets out to write about David Starr Jordan, the taxonomist who kept rebuilding his fish collection after earthquakes destroyed it, and ends up somewhere stranger: with Jordan's enthusiasm for eugenics, with the scientific consensus that the category “fish” does not really exist, and with her own reasons for needing a story about persistence. She co-founded NPR's Invisibilia and now co-hosts Radiolab.

What happens when the same affection for underwater creatures runs into the history of the people who classified them. Miller shares Montgomery's conviction that paying close attention to an animal changes you, and adds a warning Montgomery does not: that the naturalists who named these species were often pursuing something ugly. Short, fast and startling. Read it in one sitting.

— Lisanne
Every book by Lulu Miller →
06
People looking at animals

Jon Mooallem

American · Wild Ones (2013), Serious Face (2022)

Wild Ones follows polar bears in Manitoba, whooping cranes led south behind an ultralight aircraft, and a rare butterfly, and is really about the volunteers, tourists, biologists and marketing departments attached to them. Serious Face collects thirteen essays. He has been a writer at large at The New York Times Magazine for more than fifteen years.

The reporter's version of her subject, standing one step back. Montgomery is inside the relationship with the animal; Mooallem watches people form those relationships and asks what the animal has to represent before anyone will fund saving it. He is gently sceptical where she is committed, and the two together give you both the feeling and the machinery around it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jon Mooallem →

Authors like Jon Mooallem →

07
The cephalopods, from a biologist

Danna Staaf

American · Squid Empire (2017), Monarchs of the Sea (2020)

Squid Empire is the evolutionary history of cephalopods across five hundred million years: the shelled ammonites and nautiloids that once dominated the seas, the long retreat as fish and marine reptiles arrived, and the strange soft-bodied survivors left behind. Staaf has a doctorate in marine biology, and the book is the deep-time context that a book about one aquarium tank cannot supply.

The book Montgomery herself points readers toward, and the right next step if the octopus turned out to be a doorway rather than a destination. Staaf writes as a working biologist, so the wonder is structural rather than emotional: the octopus is astonishing because of what five hundred million years did to a mollusc. Less companionable than Montgomery, and more likely to stay with you as fact.

— Lisanne
08
Older than the genre · Animals as characters

Gerald Durrell

British · My Family and Other Animals (1956), The Amateur Naturalist (1982)

My Family and Other Animals is Durrell's childhood on Corfu in the 1930s, collecting scorpions, tortoises and owls while his family disintegrates comically around him, and it has never been out of print. He went on to found a zoo on Jersey in 1959 and the conservation trust that still runs it, built specifically around breeding endangered species rather than displaying popular ones, and wrote dozens of books to pay for it.

The writer who established that an animal can be a character with a name, a temperament and a plot, without the book becoming sentimental. Everything Montgomery does with Athena, Octavia and a pig called Christopher Hogwood is in this tradition, and Durrell is funnier than any of his successors. He also demonstrates the thing her critics doubt: that loving individual animals and doing serious conservation are not in conflict.

— Lisanne
09
Empathy taken to the extreme

Charles Foster

British · Being a Beast (2016)

Foster, an Oxford academic, tried to live as five animals in order to find out what their worlds are like: he ate earthworms and slept in a hole in a Welsh hillside as a badger, swam rivers as an otter, sifted through bins in East London as an urban fox, and followed swifts. It won an Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2016, which he accepted in good humour, and it is a genuinely serious book about the limits of imagining another creature.

The logical end of Montgomery's method, and a useful test of it. She gets as close to an octopus as a human can and reports what she felt; Foster tries to dissolve the distance entirely and demonstrates, mostly, that it cannot be done. He is funnier, filthier and more philosophically honest about failure. Read him when you want to know how much of the connection is the animal and how much is the person.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against her

Hal Herzog

American · Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat (2010)

Herzog is a psychologist who spent decades studying how people actually behave toward animals, and the book catalogues the inconsistencies: the same person who rescues a shelter dog eats a pig of comparable intelligence, cockfighters who are tender with their birds, animal researchers who grieve their subjects, vegetarians who lapse. He is not arguing for a position so much as showing that almost nobody holds one consistently.

The sharpest objection to this whole shelf, and it is not the obvious one. The usual complaint about Montgomery is anthropomorphism — that she cannot know what an octopus feels. Herzog asks the harder question: why this octopus and not the calamari. She is at her best on exactly that, describing grief for a mollusc most people would order fried, and reading Herzog afterwards makes that discomfort impossible to put down.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Sy Montgomery

If you want the closest match, read Helen Macdonald.

H is for Hawk. One difficult bird, one grieving falconer, and no detachment.

If you want the philosophy, read Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Other Minds. What an octopus is, by a philosopher who dives with them.

If you want the case made at length, read Carl Safina.

Beyond Words. Elephants, wolves and orcas, and what the field notes actually show.

If you want the ancestor, read Gerald Durrell.

My Family and Other Animals. Corfu, scorpions, and a family falling apart around him.

If you want the argument against her, read Hal Herzog.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why this animal and not that one.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Sy Montgomery

Who should I read if I love Sy Montgomery?

Helen Macdonald is the closest, and reviewers made the comparison as soon as The Soul of an Octopus appeared. Peter Godfrey-Smith supplies the philosophy and Montgomery recommends him herself, as she does Danna Staaf on cephalopod evolution. Carl Safina makes the case for animal emotion at length, Ed Yong explains what animals can actually perceive, and Lulu Miller and Jon Mooallem write the same wonder with more scepticism attached. Gerald Durrell is the ancestor of writing animals as characters, Charles Foster the extreme version of the method, and Hal Herzog the argument against the whole thing.

Which Sy Montgomery book should I start with?

The Soul of an Octopus (2015), which was a National Book Award finalist and is the one that made her name beyond nature-writing circles: three years with Athena, Octavia, Kali and Karma at the New England Aquarium, plus diving in French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico. The Good Good Pig (2006) is the warmest and the funniest, about the runt she and her husband raised for fourteen years in New Hampshire. How to Be a Good Creature (2018) is a memoir told through thirteen animals and is the shortest way in.

What is Deep Intellect?

The Orion magazine essay, published in the November/December 2011 issue and running to about 4,800 words, that led to the book. It describes Montgomery's first meetings with Athena, a giant Pacific octopus at the New England Aquarium, the octopus's response to being touched, and her death shortly afterwards. It went viral and remains the most-read article Orion has published. It is freely available online and takes about twenty minutes.

Is Sy Montgomery writing a new book?

She publishes very regularly — thirty-eight books to date across adult and children's non-fiction — so the question is usually which one is next rather than whether. Secrets of the Octopus, written for National Geographic to accompany their series, appeared on 19 March 2024. Nothing further has been announced as of September 2026. The Soul of an Octopus was chosen as a One Book One Community selection for 2026, which suggests it is still finding new readers a decade on.

Is it anthropomorphism?

That is the standing criticism, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Montgomery names individual octopuses, describes their personalities and mourns them, which biologists have long been trained not to do. Her defence, and Carl Safina's and Frans de Waal's, is that the opposite error is at least as common: assuming an animal feels nothing because we cannot measure it. Peter Godfrey-Smith is the best guide to where the evidence actually stands, and Hal Herzog is the sharpest on why our judgements about which animals count are so inconsistent.

What did Sy Montgomery write before the octopus book?

A great deal. The Good Good Pig (2006) is a national bestseller about Christopher Hogwood, the runt pig she raised for fourteen years. Before that she wrote about pink dolphins in the Amazon, man-eating tigers in the Sundarbans, great apes and tree kangaroos, often reporting from the field for months at a time. She has also written many books for children and worked as a documentary scriptwriter. How to Be a Good Creature collects the animals that shaped her.

What else did the octopus book lead to?

More than most books do. It has been translated into thirteen languages, and Montgomery has credited it with helping prime readers for other cephalopod work, including Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds, Danna Staaf's Squid Empire and the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. It also inspired OctoNation, an octopus enthusiasts' organisation founded by Warren Carlyle with a very large membership. If you liked the book, those three are the obvious next stops and she named them herself.

Are her children's books worth reading as an adult?

The Scientists in the Field series is, genuinely. Each volume follows working researchers into the field — snow leopards, tarantulas, kakapo, snakes — with photographs, and they are written without any of the talking-down that usually spoils the format. They also make the clearest case for what she does: the science is real, the animals are individuals, and the fieldwork is uncomfortable. Good for a curious child and a reasonable evening for an adult.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“They changed my way of living on the planet.”

— Sy Montgomery, on octopuses, CBC Radio.

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