Andrea Wulf for The Traveller

Andrea Wulf is coming to Topping & Company Booksellers on Monday 14 September, where she'll be talking about her new book, The Traveller. It's a biography of George Forster, a naturalist, explorer and revolutionary who joined Captain Cook's second voyage when he was only seventeen. From there, he moved in the circles of Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander von Humboldt.

Forster's life took a political turn when he became a leader of the short-lived Republic of Mainz, inspired by the French Revolution. That eventually led to exile in Paris during the Reign of Terror. Wulf's book aims to restore him as one of the great visionaries of his era, and Tom Holland called it "a remarkable biography of a remarkable man."

Wulf is well known for her work on the figures of the Enlightenment and the Romantics. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World won the 2015 Costa Biography Award and the 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize, and she also wrote Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. She's a member of PEN American Center, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute.

It's on Monday 14 September at Topping & Company Booksellers, 1 Museum Street, York YO1 7DT. The talk starts at 7pm, with doors opening at 6.30pm.