Natural history book series in reading order

Gerald Durrell

40 books• 3 series

Gerald Durrell was a British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist and television presenter who wrote about collecting and keeping animals. Durrell's first animal-collecting trip to the British Cameroons was funded by an inheritance, and his wife Jacquie pressed him to write an account of it. The catalogue opens with The Overloaded Ark (1953) and holds 40 books to 1993, across autobiographical volumes, the Corfu Trilogy and the Puppy Tales for children. My Family and Other Animals (1956) and A Zoo in My Luggage (1962) are among them. Zoology, natural history, animal behaviour and travel are the recurring subjects.

Peter Matthiessen

41 books• 3 series

Peter Matthiessen is the only writer to win the National Book Award in both nonfiction, for The Snow Leopard in 1979, and fiction, for Shadow Country in 2008. Matthiessen, an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, Zen teacher and one-time CIA agent, was born May 22, 1927, died April 5, 2014, and co-founded The Paris Review. Nonfiction covered nature, travel and American Indian history, including In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) on the Leonard Peltier case, and Matthiessen was also a prominent environmental activist. The catalogue lists 41 books from The Year of the Tempest (1957) to In Paradise (2014), including Wildlife in America (1959), The Cloud Forest (1961) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965).

Conn Iggulden writes historical fiction about empires and wars: the Emperor books on Rome, the Conqueror series around Genghis Khan, the Wars of the Roses, the Athenian novels and a Nero trilogy. The Gates of Rome (2002) opens a catalogue of 42 books reaching Inferno in 2026, and The Dangerous Book for Boys (2006) heads the non-fiction. The Empire of Salt fantasy appeared under the name C.F. Iggulden.

Annie Proulx

20 books• 2 series

Annie Proulx, born in 1935, is an American novelist, short story writer and journalist who has also published as E. Annie Proulx and E. A. Proulx. Her 20 catalogued books begin with the practical: Great Grapes in 1982 and Making the Best Apple Cider in 1983. Postcards then took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and made Proulx the first woman to win it, and The Shipping News, published in 1993, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the U.S. National Book Award before reaching film in 2001. The short story Brokeback Mountain became a 2005 film that won Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. Wyoming, ranch life and the frontier run through the later work, up to Fen, Bog & Swamp in 2023.

Jean Craighead George

100 books• 11 series

Julie of the Wolves won Jean Craighead George the Newbery Medal, and My Side of the Mountain (1959) earned a Newbery Honor. George, born July 2, 1919, and died May 15, 2012, was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, with the environment and the natural world as recurring themes. George also wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and an autobiography, Journey Inward, and was the U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1964. The catalogue lists 100 books from Vulpes, the Red Fox (1948) to Crowbar: The Smartest Bird in the World (2015). Series include 13 Moons, Ecological Mysteries, American Woodland Tales and One Day in the..., and subjects name wolves, owls, falcons and ecology.

William Dietrich writes historical adventure novels and natural-history non-fiction. The Ethan Gage series, set during the Napoleonic Wars, has been translated into 28 languages and includes Napoleon's Pyramids (2007) and The Rosetta Key (2008). Dietrich has also set novels in the Roman Empire, Antarctica and Australia, while his non-fiction covers the natural and environmental history of the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up and worked as a newspaper journalist. The catalogue holds 20 titles, from The Final Forest (1992) to The Trojan Icon (2016).

John Fowles was an English novelist whose work sits between modernism and postmodernism, with Sartre and Camus among the influences on it. The Collector opened the catalogue in 1963. The Magus (1965) came out of a spell teaching English on the Greek island of Spetses after Oxford, and sold immediately, in tune with the anarchism and experimental philosophy of the 1960s. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) followed: a Victorian-era romance given a postmodern turn, set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Fowles lived for much of his life. Twenty-one titles run to The Journals: Volume 2 in 2005, taking in The Ebony Tower (1974) and Daniel Martin (1977).

Peter Wohlleben

12 books• 1 series

Peter Wohlleben is a German forester and author who writes about ecology in popular language, and who has argued, controversially, for plant sentience. The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) reached the New York Times bestseller list and appeared in English in 2016. Twelve books are catalogued between 2012 and 2022, from The Weather Detective (2012) to Forest Walking (2022), among them The Inner Life of Animals (2016), The Secret Wisdom of Nature (2017), The Heartbeat of Trees (2019) and The Power of Trees (2021). Mysteries of Nature is the one series catalogued, and trees, forests, symbiosis and food chains are the constants.