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Sonia Shah on The Next Great Migration
Shah discusses migration, ecology, and the reporting behind her book at Politics and Prose.
Quick facts
Investigative · Medicine
The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients
Shah’s investigative exposé traces how pharmaceutical companies increasingly test new drugs on poor patients in the developing world, who often can’t access the medicines being tested on them once approved, revealing the ethical gaps in international clinical trial regulation.
This is Shah’s most straightforwardly investigative book, built on years of reporting into an industry practice most readers never think about. It established the pattern that runs through her later, more expansive science books: rigorous documentation of how global inequality shapes who bears the risks of scientific progress.
Science · HistoryOn my shelf
The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
Shah traces malaria’s 500,000-year history and its outsized role in shaping human civilization, from ancient Rome to the transatlantic slave trade to the ongoing failure of eradication campaigns, based on five years of reporting in Cameroon, Malawi, and Panama.
Long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize, The Fever is the book that established Shah as a major voice in infectious disease writing. It’s especially good on why a disease this well understood, medically, remains so politically and economically intractable to actually eliminate.
Science · Public Health
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
Shah traces cholera’s spread from the Bay of Bengal across the globe over two centuries to explain the conditions that turn a contained outbreak into a full pandemic, and argues that many of the same conditions — density, inequality, disrupted ecosystems — make another global pandemic increasingly likely.
Published years before COVID-19, Pandemic reads now as startlingly prescient, and was widely re-discovered in 2020 for exactly that reason. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, it remains one of the clearest explanations of pandemic mechanics available to general readers.
Science · Ecology
The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
Shah challenges the assumption that species — including humans — naturally belong to fixed places, using new GPS tracking and genetic research to show that migration, not settlement, has always been the biological norm, and arguing that treating migrants as invasive threats misreads basic ecology.
A finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, this is Shah’s most directly political book, written as global anti-immigration sentiment was hardening, though it builds its argument almost entirely from biology and ecology rather than policy debate.
Frequently asked questions about Sonia Shah’s books
From the bookshelf
“Migration is not the crisis. It's the solution.”
— Sonia Shah, on The Next Great Migration
For more science journalism that follows global inequality to its roots, browse the full shelf.
