Western industrial society’s foundational idea that Homo sapiens is special—separated from all other species by unique cognitive, technological, and communicative capacities—faces a new reckoning. Even as our technology grapples with existential threats of our own making, scientists are discovering nonhuman capacities that match or exceed our own, from self aware fish and plants that hear the sound of running water to birds that understand grammar.

Weaving personal narrative, reportage, history and science, Special: the rise and fall of a beastly idea traces how human exceptionalism shapes our world and how its collapse might transform science, medicine, history, and our ideas about ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our common future.

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026.

In this Migration Research Webinar held on 14 December 2023, Sonia Shah, an award-winning investigative journalist and author presented and discussed her latest book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

Climate change has put organisms on the move. In her new book, The Next Great Migration, science writer Sonia Shah writes about migration — and the ways in which outmoded notions of "belonging" have been used throughout history to curb what she sees as a biological imperative.

There is a tendency to view plants, animals and people who cross into a new territory as a threat to the current habitat. But in this interview with NPR's Fresh Air, Sonia Shah says there's another way to think about these "invaders."

My 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move (Bloomsbury) explores our centuries-long assumptions about human and animal migration through science, history, and reporting, predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. A finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, it was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, a best science book of 2020 by Amazon, a best science and technology book of 2020 by Library Journal, and a Tata Literature Live! finalist for the best book of the year. Author and activist Naomi Klein calls it a “dazzlingly original picture,” “rich with eclectic research and on-the-ground reporting,” and a “story threaded with joy and inspiration.”

My 2016 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond–available in August 2020 with a new preface–describes how social, cultural, and political factors turn microbes into pandemic-causing pathogens. The book has been called “superbly written,” (The Economist) , “bracingly intelligent” (Nature),  “provocative” and “chilling,” (New York Times), a “lively, rigorously researched and highly informative read,” (Wall Street Journal) and “absorbing, complex, and ominous,” (Publishers Weekly). It was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and as a finalist for the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science/technology, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award.

My 2010 book, The Fever, long-listed for the Royal Society's Winton Prize and selected by the New York Times as one of “7 Essential Books About Pandemics," tells the story of humankind's oldest pathogen, from its role in the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wartimes and the advances of the Industrial Revolution. A “tour-de-force history of malaria” (New York Times), “rollicking” (Time), and “brilliant” (Wall Street Journal).