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  • Published: 16 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529933611
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $29.99

Nexus

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI





The phenomenal global and Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Sapiens

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has brought us here. Taking us from the Stone Age through the canonisation of the Bible, the invention of print, the rise of mass media and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

  • Published: 16 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529933611
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Yuval Noah Harari

Prof Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international phenomenon attracting a legion of fans from Bill Gates and Barack Obama to Chris Evans and Jarvis Cocker, and is published in over forty-five languages worldwide. It was a Sunday Times Number One bestseller and was in the Top Ten for over nine months in paperback. His follow-up to Sapiens, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow was also a Top Ten Bestseller and was described by the Guardian as ‘even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens’.

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Praise for Nexus

Tremendous, thought-provoking and so very well reasoned. Harari gives us a vision of a rapidly approaching future that is at one and the same time thrilling and chilling. If there is one book that I would urge everyone to read – our political, corporate and cultural leaders most especially – it is Nexus

STEPHEN FRY

Harari has a unique ability to unite both history’s finest details and its grandest megatrends in a single view. This deeply important book comes at a critical time as we all think through the implications of AI

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN

Harari is one of the most remarkable intellects of our generation – bold, original, erudite, provocative and entrancing. His latest book reimagines everything from literacy to AI and – like all his books – fundamentally shifts one’s view of the world

RORY STEWART

[Harari] sticks the world together in a gleaming shape that inspires and excites

TELEGRAPH

[An] always rewarding, often alarming book

LITERARY REVIEW

Engrossing . . . A diagnosis and a call to action . . . If [Nexus] sells anywhere near as well as Sapiens did, we’ll be that bit better equipped as a species to deal with the rise of the machines

OBSERVER

A historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly . . . Harari's narrative is engaging, and his framing is strikingly original

ECONOMIST

A superb narrative writer

GUARDIAN

[Harari] connects past and future in a way that’s both enlightening and a little eerie. Nexus isn’t just a critique of technology; it’s a reflection on how we’ve always been vulnerable to those who control information. It’s a wake-up call in the gentlest, most urgent way

YOTAM OTTOLENGHI

Yuval Noah Harari is the undisputed maestro of the big idea . . . Nobody can pull of a big theory as suavely as he can

THE TIMES

[A] thoughtful book . . . An important perspective at a time when the info-wars seem likely to only get worse

Gillian Tett, FINANCIAL TIMES

[Harari] makes fun of people like myself who saw more information as always a good thing . . . I would basically say he’s right and I was wrong

BILL GATES

A useful, well-informed primer . . . Wise and bold

NEW YORK TIMES

One of our foremost big-picture thinkers about the grand sweep of humanity, history and the future

TIME

Nexus is an important book and comes at an important time in human history

SCIENCE

Nexus is ambitious, bold and, at times, unsettling . . . For anyone interested in the intersection of history, technology and power, Harari once again provokes deep thought

THE CONVERSATION

Nexus will challenge your core beliefs about technology and information while leaving you grateful for the experience

DR JOY BUOLAMWINI, author of UNMASKING AI

In Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari uses information networks as the backbone of human evolution, offering profound insights into how technological progress reshapes our social structures and individual lives. His unique perspectives and deep understanding of the age of artificial intelligence is especially pertinent in the current wave of transformations driven by generative AI. The book urges us to reassess the relationship between humans and AI and how we can ensure that technological progress serves the greater good for humanity

KAI-FU LEE, author of AI 2041
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