Yuval Noah Harari Books in Order

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and writer whose books zoom out to look at the whole human story. He likes simple questions with huge scope: how did we become the dominant species on Earth, and what might replace us next?

He was born in Israel in 1976 and grew up in a secular Jewish family in and around Haifa. As a teenager he was drawn to history and ideas more than to politics or business. He went on to study history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1990s, specialising in medieval and military history.

Harari completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2002, writing about Renaissance military memoirs under the supervision of historian Steven Gunn. After postdoctoral work, he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has taught world and military history. His first books were dense academic studies of war, identity and battlefield experience in late medieval and early modern Europe.

Only later did he turn that training into the sweeping, accessible style that made him famous.

In the early 2000s Harari began teaching a large survey course on the history of humankind. Those lectures slowly evolved into Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, first published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English a few years later. The book follows Homo sapiens from prehistoric foragers through the Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions, arguing that our real superpower is the ability to believe shared stories about things like gods, nations and money. Sapiens went on to reach a worldwide audience, selling millions of copies and being translated into many languages.

Two companion books expanded that project. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow looks forward, exploring how biotechnology, algorithms and data‑driven systems could let humans chase happiness, redesign bodies and perhaps make themselves obsolete. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century comes back to the present, collecting essays on work, nationalism, religion, truth and education in an age of rapid technological change.

Harari has also reworked his ideas for new audiences. The graphic‑novel trilogy Sapiens: A Graphic History turns his big arguments into colourful comics, while the Unstoppable Us series introduces middle‑grade readers to the long arc of human history. His 2024 book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI traces how stories, bureaucracies, media and now artificial intelligence have tied people together and reshaped power.

Across these works, certain themes repeat. Harari is fascinated by the boundary between biology and culture, the way humans use fiction to organise societies, and the trade‑offs between freedom, order and truth. He often writes in short, pointed chapters that mix historical case studies with speculation about where we may be heading.

Outside the classroom and the page, Harari leads a relatively quiet life. He lives with his husband and manager, Itzik Yahav, and has spoken openly about being gay, vegan and sceptical of organised religion. Since encountering Vipassana meditation around 2000, he has kept up a strict practice, meditating for hours each day and spending long periods each year on silent retreat. He has said that the focus and distance he gains on retreat are part of how he writes about such large, unsettling questions.

Harari now divides his time between teaching, research, writing and public talks. Together with Yahav he co‑founded Sapienship, a social‑impact project that uses books, courses and media to push long‑term thinking about global challenges such as technology, war and climate. Whether you agree with his arguments or not, his work is meant as an invitation to zoom out, question easy stories and think a bit more carefully about the future we are building.