A few books that help understand Wuhan and central China:
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River Town (1999) by Peter Hessler. Not set in Wuhan but in nearby Fuling on the Yangtze, this American writer's classic memoir of teaching English in a small Yangtze town captures the texture of late-1990s inland China better than any other book — and the boat journey upstream from Wuhan is part of the story.
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The Rape of Nanking (1997) by Iris Chang. Wuhan was the next major city to fall to the Japanese after Nanjing and the wartime context — the gunboats on the Yangtze, the refugee floods — is essential background to the modern city's character.
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The Search for Modern China (1990) by Jonathan Spence. The standard history of China from 1600. Useful for understanding why Wuhan — site of the 1911 uprising and of decades of treaty-port pressure — is positioned the way it is in the Chinese national story.
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The Wuhan Diary (2020) by Fang Fang. The novelist's online journal from the city during the early COVID-19 lockdown, controversial in China and widely translated. A first-hand account of a winter that put Wuhan unwillingly into the global imagination.