What books does Stephen Hawking recommend?

Ranging from popular-science classics to the novels that shaped his imagination, the book recommendations of Stephen Hawking, who reshaped our understanding of black holes and time, reveal a reader of surprising breadth. This set of 10 titles draws on his BBC appearances, forewords he wrote, and the further-reading list in his own The Universe in a Nutshell. Science and technology leads, with fiction and philosophy close behind. On Desert Island Discs he chose George Eliot's Middlemarch, calling it "a book for adults... the first English novel written for adults." A longtime fan of Douglas Adams, he said simply, "I have been a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide for many years," and he championed accessible physics, writing in his foreword to The Physics of Star Trek that "to confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."

Last updated February 2026 · Every recommendation cited to its original source.