[]
The Traveller
  • Published: 1 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241711217
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $100.00
Categories:

The Traveller

The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity

Formats & editions
Hardback
1 Sept 2026
EBook
2 June 2026
Pre-order from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

An inspiring biography of the remarkable naturalist, explorer and revolutionary, by the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature

George Forster was a man out of time: he journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and challenged the worldviews of eighteenth-century Europe with radical ideas about equality and freedom. Celebrated during his lifetime, he knew Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander von Humboldt but has since been largely forgotten by history.

The Traveller seeks to restore Forster as one of the great visionaries of his era. At the age of seventeen he joined Captain Cook’s second voyage – an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to the tropical islands of the South Pacific. A brilliant mind driven by boundless curiosity, he studied the diverse nature, people and cultures he encountered and came back imbued with a deep belief in the equality of races. On his return he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and human rights and against empire, racism and slavery. He admired strong and educated women and was proud to have daughters. The book traces how – inspired by the French Revolution – he became a leader of the short-lived Republic of Mainz and was eventually forced into exile in Paris during the Reign of Terror.

Following in Forster’s footsteps from Europe to Tahiti, and drawing on a wealth of correspondence mostly unpublished in English, Andrea Wulf paints a portrait of a remarkable, passionate figure unbound by place, people or establishment. She vividly conveys his extraordinary quest to find what connects us rather than what sets us apart.
  • Published: 1 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241711217
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $100.00
Categories:

About the author

Andrea Wulf

Andrea Wulf was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the author of The Brother Gardeners (longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award), The Founding Gardeners, Chasing Venus and the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and many others. She lives in London.
portrait photo of Andrea Wulf

Also by Andrea Wulf

The Founding Gardeners
Chasing Venus
The Brother Gardeners
See all

Praise for The Traveller

A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. Wulf’s books are always horizon-expanding, but with this one she has excelled herself. I loved it

Tom Holland

As George Forster circumnavigates the globe, Wulf circumnavigates the Enlightenment mind in all its complexity, making for a doubly brilliant and breathtaking adventure

Sue Prideaux

The dauntless Andrea Wulf has gone adventuring, and returned with this enthralling account of young, nomadic George Forster. Her superb narrative shimmers with scholarly detail and magnificently sustains the "breathless exhilaration" of his journeys, his extraordinarily liberal and observant mind and the intense emotional drama of his life. A combination of panoramic travelogue and tender psychological study animated at every point by Wulf’s own travels and research, The Traveller is hypnotically successful and wonderfully restores George Forster as a major historical figure of early European Romanticism

Richard Holmes

Andrea Wulf belongs to the small, splendid canon of writers unafraid to render fact with feeling. The Traveller is a work of devotion and rigor celebrating a man's courage to look past the horizon of his era's assumptions

Maria Popova

Unfailingly and inspiringly humane, George Forster is the overlooked tragic hero of the European Enlightenment. With her characteristic combination of scholarship and empathy, Andrea Wulf conjures the global range of his curiosity, and the poignant wilderness of his family life. This book is the memorial that he has long deserved

Neil MacGregor