Author Guide · Popular Science
Books Written by
For Bonk, Mary Roach and her husband, Ed, volunteered to have sex while a doctor watched on a 4D ultrasound scanner. For Packing for Mars she reported on Japanese astronaut candidates locked in isolation and made to fold a thousand paper cranes; for Grunt she went to a US base in Djibouti where diarrhoea counted as a threat to the mission. Roach, born in New Hampshire in 1959, spent years as a magazine freelancer in San Francisco before Stiff (2003), her book about human cadavers, became a bestseller. Every book since takes one awkward subject — the afterlife, sex, space, digestion, war, wildlife, spare body parts — and goes to the people who study it. This guide covers her eight key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 key books · 2003–2025 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Mary Roach has written eight books of popular science, from Stiff (2003), about what happens to bodies donated to science, through Bonk (2008), Packing for Mars (2010) and Gulp (2013) to Replaceable You (2025), plus a 2013 collection of columns. Start with Stiff: it is her best-known book and the one that set the method she has used ever since.
Where to Start with Mary Roach
If you want her defining book
→ Stiff (2003) — human cadavers and what science does with them.
If you want space without the mythology
→ Packing for Mars (2010) — eating, sleeping and going to the toilet in orbit.
If you want the body from mouth to exit
→ Gulp (2013) — taste, saliva, stomach acid and Elvis’s colon.
If you want her newest book
→ Replaceable You (2025) — how medicine repairs and replaces body parts.
8 Mary Roach Books, in Order
Stiff
What happens to bodies donated to science: crash-test research, surgeons practising on cadavers, decomposition studies at the University of Tennessee’s “body farm”, and the history of grave-robbing and early anatomy. Her first book, it became a New York Times bestseller and was one of Entertainment Weekly’s best books of 2003.
Spook
Roach looks at attempts to find scientific evidence of a soul or an afterlife: children in India said to be reincarnated relatives, experiments to weigh or record the soul, mediums tested in university labs, a medium school in England, and the idea that some ghost sightings come from low-frequency infrasound. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
Bonk
A history of sex research from Aristotle to Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, plus the labs working on it now, including Danish researchers inseminating sows. Roach and her husband took part in a 4D ultrasound study themselves. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Packing for Mars
The physical side of human spaceflight: how astronauts eat, wash and use the toilet, Japan’s isolation tests for astronaut candidates, a volunteer who spent three months in bed to study bone loss, and NASA’s vacuum chambers. Only the last pages are about Mars itself. San Francisco chose it for its One City One Book programme in 2011.
Gulp
The digestive tract from mouth to rectum: taste and smell, saliva, William Beaumont’s nineteenth-century experiments on the stomach of Alexis St. Martin, the megacolon found at Elvis Presley’s autopsy, and prisoners who smuggle phones in their rectums. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2014.
Grunt
Not weapons but the people who carry them: heat, noise, panic and exhaustion, why zippers are a problem for snipers, amputee actors who help train Marine Corps medics, diarrhoea at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and missile crews on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee.
Fuzz
What happens when animals and people collide: bears raiding bins in Aspen, elephants and leopards in India, macaques that steal food, wildlife forensics labs, and the researchers looking for ways to manage “problem” animals without killing them.
Replaceable You
How medicine has tried to repair or replace failing body parts, from brass noses to organs grown with stem cells and 3D printers. Roach reports from a burn unit in Boston, a pig facility in China, a stem-cell hair lab in San Diego and an iron lung, and travels with cataract surgeons in Mongolia. W. W. Norton published it in September 2025.
In What Order to Read Mary Roach
Each book stands alone, so you can start with whichever subject you are most curious about. Reading in publication order shows the reach growing: the first three books stay with the body and what we fear about it, the later ones take the same approach to institutions such as NASA and the military, and to the animal world.
Stiff is the clearest introduction to how she works. If you want only a taste first, her 2009 TED talk on orgasm research distils Bonk in about seventeen minutes.
A reading path
1. Stiff (2003)
2. Packing for Mars (2010)
3. Gulp (2013)
4. Grunt (2016)
5. Replaceable You (2025)
Everything Else Mary Roach Published
Beyond the 8 key books: 1 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Collections
1
1 book · 2013
- 2013My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Placesher humour columns from Reader’s Digest
The years · 1959–2025
Quick facts about Mary Roach
- Known for
- Mary Roach is known for funny, closely reported popular science about subjects most people avoid, starting with human cadavers in Stiff.
- 1959
- Born in Hanover, New Hampshire
- 1981
- Graduates from Wesleyan University
- 2003
- Stiff
- 2014
- Gulp shortlisted for the Royal Society prize
- 2025
- Replaceable You
- Born
- 20 March 1959, Hanover, New Hampshire; raised in Etna
- Education
- Wesleyan University, BA in psychology, 1981
- Before books
- Freelance writer for Salon, Reader’s Digest, Vogue, GQ and others
- Editor
- Guest editor, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011
- Shortlisted
- Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, 2014, for Gulp
- Lives
- Oakland, California
The red mark is 2003: Stiff, her first book and the one that made her name.
How Mary Roach Writes: Going Where the Squeamish Won’t
Roach does not start from a field of expertise. She picks a subject people are embarrassed or uneasy about, then finds the specialists who work on it and goes to see them: crash-test labs, a body farm, an isolation chamber, a submarine, a stem-cell lab. Most chapters are built around one visit, with the history of the question folded in.
She puts herself in the scenes and is often the joke, asking the question a reader would be too polite to ask, and the asides often go in footnotes. She sometimes takes part: for Bonk she and her husband were scanned during sex. The humour sits on top of the reporting; the facts come from the researchers she interviews and the studies she reads.
Her subjects are the body and the institutions that deal with it, so each book can be read alone. For writers with the same mix of curiosity and wit, from Bill Bryson to Ed Yong, see Authors like Mary Roach.
Watch
Mary Roach on Grunt and the science of soldiers at war
At the Library of Congress National Book Festival in 2016, Roach talks about her work in the year Grunt, her book on the science of soldiers at war, came out.
Frequently asked questions about Mary Roach’s books
How many books has Mary Roach written?
Nine under her own name: the eight books of popular science on this page, from Stiff (2003) to Replaceable You (2025), and My Planet (2013), a collection of her Reader’s Digest columns.
What are Mary Roach’s books in order?
Stiff (2003), Spook (2005), Bonk (2008), Packing for Mars (2010), Gulp (2013), Grunt (2016), Fuzz (2021) and Replaceable You (2025). My Planet, a collection of columns, also came out in 2013.
What is the best Mary Roach book to start with?
Stiff. It is her best-known book, and it sets out the method she has used ever since: a subject most people avoid, reported in person from the labs that study it, and written with humour.
What is Mary Roach’s most famous book?
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), about what happens to bodies donated to science. It was her first book and a New York Times bestseller.
What is Mary Roach’s newest book?
Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, published by W. W. Norton in September 2025, about how medicine repairs and replaces body parts.
Is Mary Roach’s writing scientifically accurate?
She is a journalist, not a scientist, but her books rest on original reporting: she visits labs and field sites and interviews the researchers directly. The humour sits on top of that research rather than replacing it.
Has Mary Roach won any prizes?
Gulp was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2014. Bonk was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and Spook a New York Times Notable Book.
Did Mary Roach give a TED talk?
Yes. “10 things you didn’t know about orgasm” (2009), based on the research for Bonk, became one of TED’s most popular talks.
Does Mary Roach take part in her own research?
Sometimes. For Bonk she and her husband, Ed, volunteered to have sex while being scanned with a 4D ultrasound. In most books she observes and asks questions rather than taking part.
Is Mary Roach still alive?
Yes. She was born on 20 March 1959 in Hanover, New Hampshire, and lives in Oakland, California. Her most recent book, Replaceable You, came out in 2025.
Footnotes
- Mary Roach — Wikipedia
- Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex — Wikipedia
- Spook — Kirkus Reviews, 2005
- Packing for Mars — The Christian Science Monitor, 2010
- Mary Roach on Fuzz — NPR, 2021
- Replaceable You — Bookshop.org
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back.”
— Mary Roach, Stiff (2003), the opening lines
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsRead next
