September has long been the month when publishers empty their best ideas onto the shelves, and 2026 is no exception. New Scientist’s round-up of the month’s most promising popular science titles is headlined by two very different but equally recognisable names: the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli and the British doctor and broadcaster Xand van Tulleken.
It is a pairing that neatly captures the breadth of what popular science has become. On one side sits the cosmos â time, space and the deep structure of reality. On the other sits the human body, and the messy, commercial, political world that shapes what we put into it.
The physicist who writes like a poet
Rovelli needs little introduction to anyone who has browsed a bookshop’s science table in the past decade. A leading figure in loop quantum gravity, he became an unlikely international bestseller with slim, lyrical volumes that treat physics as a branch of the humanities as much as a technical discipline. His writing is characterised by short chapters, an allergy to jargon and a willingness to bring in poetry, philosophy and personal reflection alongside equations that never quite appear on the page.
That approach has made him one of the few working physicists whose books sell in the millions, and it has also drawn criticism from readers who prefer their science served with more rigour and fewer metaphors. Either way, a new Rovelli title is an event in the genre, and its arrival this month is a large part of why September’s list looks so strong.
Medicine, food and the body
Xand van Tulleken comes at science from the opposite direction. A medical doctor with a background in public health and humanitarian work, he is familiar to British audiences from television and radio, often alongside his twin brother Chris. In recent years he has become one of the more prominent voices in public conversations about food, health and the systems that shape both â territory where scientific evidence, personal experience and industry influence are tangled together in ways that make for compelling, and often uncomfortable, reading.
Books in this space have found a huge audience precisely because they sit at the intersection of laboratory research and everyday life. Readers who will never think about quantum gravity again after finishing a Rovelli book still have to decide what to eat for dinner.
Why September matters
The timing is not accidental. Publishers cluster their strongest non-fiction in early autumn to catch the run-up to prize season and the Christmas market, which means September typically delivers the densest concentration of serious science writing in the calendar. For readers, that makes it the best month of the year to browse â and the hardest to choose.
Beyond the headline names, monthly round-ups of this kind usually gather a wider spread: natural history, neuroscience, climate, technology and the history of ideas, often from debut authors who deserve more attention than their marketing budgets allow. Those quieter titles are frequently the ones that stay with readers longest.
What the September crop underlines is that popular science is no longer a single genre. It stretches from meditations on the nature of time to hard-nosed reporting on the food industry, and the fact that both can top the same list is a sign of how healthy the field remains. Read More
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