David Gibbins Books in Order

If you want the main Jack Howard story from the beginning: Atlantis → Crusader Gold → The Lost Tomb
If you want Egypt-focused archaeological suspense: Pharaoh → Pyramid
If you want Roman military historical fiction: Destroy Carthage → The Sword of Attila
If you want real-world shipwreck history: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks
If you want a newer coming-of-age historical adventure: Daughter of Attila

David Gibbins was born in 1962 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to English parents who were both academic scientists. His childhood moved between Canada, New Zealand, and England, and he had already circled the globe by sea before he was six.

The sea got him early.

As a boy he was drawn to shipwrecks, diving, and the kind of exploration stories that make the past feel close enough to touch. Growing up in Ontario, he read widely about underwater discoveries and qualified as a scuba diver at fifteen, then started exploring wrecks in the Great Lakes. That mix of curiosity and cold water stayed with him.

It turned into an academic life. He took first-class honours at the University of Bristol, then completed a PhD in archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After that he spent almost ten years teaching archaeology and ancient history in England, much of the 1990s at the University of Liverpool.

He didn't have to invent his obsessions.

Gibbins led and joined expeditions on historic shipwrecks and other underwater sites in the Mediterranean, Britain, Canada, and Turkey. He has written scholarly work on maritime archaeology, and his field experience kept feeding new ideas back into his fiction. When he left academia to write full time, he took that whole background with him.

You can feel it in the novels. Atlantis, Crusader Gold, and The Lost Tomb all move like thrillers, but they are built from real archaeological problems, dive know-how, ancient texts, and the stubborn detail work of trying to prove something about the past. Later books such as Pharaoh and Inquisition keep widening the map, taking readers from Egypt and Khartoum to Cornwall, Tangier, and the colonial Atlantic, while still staying close to the nuts and bolts of discovery.

His stories usually begin with a relic, a wreck, or a scrap of evidence that should not matter as much as it does. Then the trouble starts. Again and again he returns to lost cities, buried archives, imperial frontiers, and the uneasy overlap between scholarship and danger. Even when the books get big in scale, there is usually a practical streak running through them, the diver checking a line, the archaeologist reading a layer of soil, the historian noticing that one detail does not fit.

He has also written straight historical fiction in the Total War Rome novels, and later turned to nonfiction with A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, a book that lets him work directly with the material he knows best. Along the way he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow. Those details matter less as decoration than as a clue to the life behind the books, one shaped by travel, research, and time in the field.

Today he continues to divide his time between England and Canada when he is not travelling or working on projects. He still writes from the overlap between archaeology and adventure, which is probably why his novels feel grounded even when the mysteries are huge. With Gibbins, the excitement usually starts with an old object in the dark and the sense that history is not finished speaking yet.