Julian Sancton Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Julian Sancton is an American published author.

Before releasing his bestselling books, he wrote pieces that were featured in publications such as Esquire, Departures, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy, GQ, National Geographic, and Wired, as well as others.

Much of his childhood was spent in France. Julian attended Harvard University and studied European history. He has a partner Jessica and they share two daughters, living together in Larchmont, New York.

Julian is known for writing Madhouse at the End of the Earth and Neptune’s Fortune. He has also served as a senior features editor at The Hollywood Reporter. He has reported from every continent on Earth, including Antarctica.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night is a 2021 book by Julian Sancton. This was a New York Times bestseller and is the true story of a team’s fight to survive when their polar expedition goes wrong.

Everything that can go awry does in this thriller, as the ship gets frozen in the ice and the crew gets trapped inside of it for the entire Antarctic winter without sun. The New York Times called this book ‘exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing’, while The Wall Street Journal comments that the ‘energy of the narrative never flags’.

The year is 1897 and the month is August when the Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache takes off, sailing on a three year expedition on the ship Belgica. He is coveting dreams of glory and his destination was Antarctica, the uncharted end of the earth and a place that few have seen to this day.

De Gerlache had every intent of making his way to the South Pole and to be the first to do so. But all of his plans are about to go wrong in a stunning fashion. He goes through a series of expensive setbacks and after that is facing down two options. He can either go back and save his men from going through the perilous winter, or go after his dreams of fame and go further into the cold waters.

De Gerlache decided that it was worth the risk and kept sailing on. It was not too long before the Belgica gets stuck in the Bellingshausen Sea and is trapped inside of its icy hold. The sun sets on the polar landscape for just one more time and the occupants of the ship had to deal with months of being in a night that never ended. In this darkness, bored and dealing with a strange illness, they slowly make their way into madness.

It sounds like a horror story that is too terrible to be real, but this story of adventure gone wrong is all true. This is the incredible story of the crew going towards the edge of de Gerlache becoming dependent more and more on the young officers Dr. Frederick Cook and the first mate Roald Amundsen. Together they come up with a last minute plan to get away from the ice that would either make them famous or ensure that they went to the bottom of the sea.

The book also pulls from the journals and the diaries of the Belgica crew. With access to the ship’s logbook included, Sancton brings the story of this crew to life in a trip that was such a test of what extreme conditions humans can go through that NASA today studies it for research on how isolation might affect future missions to Mars. The result is an incredible thriller that is full of horror that nonfiction fans will not want to miss.

Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire is a 2026 book by Julian Sancton. If you love history and nonfiction, you have every reason to check out this book that is the incredible true story of a Spanish galleon that went missing off the Colombian coast containing over a billion dollars in gold and silver and follows along with one man’s obsession with finding it.

The Wall Street Journal praised this story and the author as being ‘an expert guide through eighteenth-century European geopolitics [and] modern marine archaeology’. This book is incredibly interesting and the type of book that brings more readers to the genre of nonfiction just because it is so thrilling.

Roger Dooley didn’t set out to find the San José. But when he found something in the stacks of a Spanish archive, it ended up taking him to the discovery of a lifetime. This would be the story of a treasure ship full of treasure from the New World that had been headed to Spain but never got there.

Instead of arriving, the galleon San José met a horrible fate. It was pulled into battle with British ships of war off of the Cartagena coast. When the smoke ended up clearing away, the galleon and all that it held was lost to the ocean with the coordinates unknown– until now.

Dooley was a diver but despite this fact, he was not the main contender to find the San José. He didn’t have serious credentials, but his determination to find the ship and excavate it drove him over the course of four decades. Even as he became exiled from his country of birth, he maintained his single minded devotion to locating the San José.

Dooley is not the only one out there looking for the galleon. He has to deal with well-known treasure hunters and competitors who are much better funded. He slowly came to find a patch of sea that might have the shipwreck he is after, but will he be elated by the results or disappointed by the big discovery of nothing?

This is an incredible adventure that speaks to the treasure hunter inside all of us. Sometimes we just find that one thing in our life that drives us and motivates us, even though we cannot completely explain why. Find out whether Dooley can locate the famous wreck by getting a copy of Neptune’s Fortune by Julian Sancton today.