We’re all dealing with the threat of COV-19/corona in our own different ways. If you want to explore the fear created by pandemics and/or read stories of survival, we got you covered with both fiction & nonfiction reads.
Below is our ultimate list of 37 books about pandemics & epidemics in real-life & fantastical scenarios.
(If you’re looking for medical nonfiction which has nothing to do with the pandemic such as doctor memoirs & scientific discovery histories, check out our Ultimate List of 34 Medical Nonfiction Books.)
Important note
Many of the books below are detailed & chilling. In addition, some of the books warn of pandemics to come which may only serve to raise your level of panic. If fear is getting to you or you end up being triggered by one of these books, we suggest balancing that out by:
Reading one of the happy escapes in our list of 8 Books to Make You Feel Good
Avoiding talk of COV-19/corona & instead, focusing on general reading by joining our online book club to read books from other countries
Following the recommendation below taken from two experts we know (a clinical psychologist & a pulmonologist) which serves a dual purpose—to help reduce anxiety & keep your lungs in great shape:
“Three or four times a day, try to take 10 slow and very deep breaths. These deep-breathing exercises will keep the pulmonary alveoli that are seldom used well exercised making them active and less prone to harbor infections that love these infrequently-used parts of the lung. Find a safe place away from people to do this (or do this every time you wash your hands). These exercises are recommended post-surgery by pulmonologists to keep from coming down with pneumonia and can be used as a prophylactic measure in general for good lung health. In addition, these exercises are also used as part of a program by psychologists to help treat anxiety making them the perfect 2-for-1 exercises during this time of crisis.”
Now onto the books…
From a prizewinning South African author comes an “international bestseller: an Afrikaner boy and his father navigate post-Apocalyptic South Africa—’reminiscent of The Stand and The Passage’ - Stephen King
Nico Storm and his father, Willem, drive a truck filled with essential supplies through a desolate land. They are among the few in the world, as far as they know, to have survived a devastating virus that has swept over the planet. In this new reality, Nico realizes that his superb marksmanship and cool head mean he is destined to be his father’s protector, even though he is still only a boy.
Willem Storm, though not a fighter, is a wise and compassionate man with a vision for a new community that survivors will rebuild from the ruins. And so Amanzi is founded, drawing Storm’s ‘homeless and tempest-tost’—starting with Melinda Swanevelder, whom they rescue from brutal thugs; Hennie Fly, with his vital Cessna plane; Beryl Fortuin and her ragtag group of orphans; and Domingo, the man with the tattooed hand. Then Sofia Bergman arrives, the most beautiful girl Nico has ever seen, who changes everything.
As the community grows, so do the challenges they face—not just from the attacks of biker brigands, but also from within. Looking back later in life, Nico recounts the traumatic events that led to the greatest rupture of all—the murder of the person he loves most.”
“Compelling, action-packed and fraught with emotion . . . bears favourable comparison with landmarks of the genre such as Stephen King’s The Stand and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Simply stunning.” - John Coates, Express (UK)
“Great stuff.” - Stephen King
“Before AIDS or Ebola, there was the Spanish Flu — Catharine Arnold's gripping narrative, Pandemic 1918, marks the 100th anniversary of an epidemic that altered world history.
In January 1918, as WW I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the title of ‘Spanish Flu.’ Nowhere on earth escaped: the US recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled over two million.
Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. The city of Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy.
Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of the terrible epidemic.”
“A stunning new novel from the #1 NY Times bestselling author Nora Roberts—Year One is an epic of hope and horror, chaos and magick, and a journey that will unite a desperate group of people to fight the battle of their lives…
It began on New Year’s Eve.
The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed—and more than half of the world’s population was decimated.
Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham, practicing in the loft apartment she shares with her lover, Max. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere, around a corner, in fetid tunnels beneath the river—or in the ones you know and love the most.
As word spreads that neither the immune nor the gifted are safe from the authorities who patrol the ravaged streets, and with nothing left to count on but each other, Lana and Max make their way out of a wrecked New York City. At the same time, other travelers are heading west too, into a new frontier. Chuck, a tech genius trying to hack his way through a world gone offline. Arlys, a journalist who has lost her audience but uses pen and paper to record the truth. Fred, her young colleague, possessed of burgeoning abilities and an optimism that seems out of place in this bleak landscape. And Rachel and Jonah, a resourceful doctor and a paramedic who fend off despair with their determination to keep a young mother and three infants in their care alive.
In a world of survivors where every stranger encountered could be either a savage or a savior, none of them knows exactly where they are heading, or why. But a purpose awaits them that will shape their lives and the lives of all those who remain.
The end has come. The beginning comes next.”
“With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know. . . .
“A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.” - The NY Times Book Review
”It is the 14th century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation.
Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold New World.”
“Exceptional and engrossing.” - NY Post
“Ambitious . . . ingenious.” - Newsday
“In this account, a journalist traces the course of the infectious disease known as yellow fever, ‘vividly [evoking] the Faulkner-meets-Dawn of the Dead horrors’ (The NYTimes Book Review) of this killer virus.
Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis alone, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.
In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country—and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With ‘arresting tales of heroism,’ (Publishers Weekly) it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.”
“Astonishing ... a fascinating exploration of the future.” - The New York Times
“The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.
Now, twenty years after the Rising, Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives-the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will out, even if it kills them.
Feed is the electrifying and critically acclaimed novel of a world a half-step from our own---a novel of geeks, zombies, politics and social media.“
“While there's plenty of zombie mayhem, political snark, and pointedly funny observations here, the heart of this book is about human relationships, which are still the most important thing in the world...even in a world where you might have to shoot the person you love most in the head, just to stop them from biting off your face." - Locus
“As brilliant a dark dream as has ever been dreamed in this century.” - Palm Beach Post
"[The Stand] has everything. Adventure. Romance. Prophecy. Allegory. Satire. Fantasy. Realism. Apocalypse. Great!" - The NY Times Book Review
“Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.
A patient escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the world’s population within a few weeks. Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge—Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious ‘Dark Man,’ who delights in chaos and violence.
As the dark man and the peaceful woman gather power, the survivors will have to choose between them—and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.
(This edition includes all of the new and restored material first published in The Stand: The Complete And Uncut Edition.)
“A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe…putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.” - Kirkus Reviews
“Accessible and engrossing...” - Publishers Weekly
“A compellingly vivid account.” - The Guardian
“La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death.
The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history—a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.
“A terrifying thriller that will crawl beneath your skin...and leave fresh blood on every page.
Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families.
Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common—they’ve been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.
Meanwhile Perry Dawsey—a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey—awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices...he is infected.
The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.”
Multi-award winner & named Best Book of the Year by NPR, The New Yorker, Elle, Marie Claire, The Paris Review, Bustle, Refinery29, & countless others
“Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.
So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as an anonymous blogger.
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place where, Bob promises, they’ll have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?
A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.”
“In 1665, the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Famed author Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. Journal of the Plague Year follows Defoe's fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London.
Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some—with crosses on their doors—overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.
Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail, it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written.”
A finalist for the National Book Award & PEN/Faulkner Award
“An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.”
“Popular science writing at its best and a most infectious page-turner.” - People
”A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall.” - Newsweek
“The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus.
A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic ‘hot’ virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their ‘crashes’ into the human race.
Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.
Other Dark Biology reads by the same author:
“Set against the backdrop of one of the most virulent epidemics that America ever experienced–the 1918 flu epidemic–Thomas Mullen’s powerful, sweeping novel is a tale of morality in a time of upheaval.
Deep in the mist-shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest is a small mill town called Commonwealth, conceived as a haven for workers weary of exploitation. For Philip Worthy, the adopted son of the town’s founder, it is a haven in another sense—as the first place in his life he’s had a loving family to call his own.
And yet, the ideals that define this outpost are being threatened from all sides. A world war is raging, and with the fear of spies rampant, the loyalty of all Americans is coming under scrutiny. Meanwhile, another shadow has fallen across the region in the form of a deadly illness striking down vast swaths of surrounding communities.
When Commonwealth votes to quarantine itself against contagion, guards are posted at the single road leading in and out of town, and Philip Worthy is among them. He will be unlucky enough to be on duty when a cold, hungry, tired—and apparently ill—soldier presents himself at the town’s doorstep begging for sanctuary. The encounter that ensues, and the shots that are fired, will have deafening reverberations throughout Commonwealth, escalating until every human value—love, patriotism, community, family, friendship—not to mention the town’s very survival, is imperiled.
Inspired by a little-known historical footnote regarding towns that quarantined themselves during the 1918 epidemic, The Last Town on Earth is a remarkably moving and accomplished novel.”
An international bestseller by famed Portuguese author, José Saramago
“This is a shattering work by a literary master.” - Boston Globe
“A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A city is hit by an epidemic of ‘white blindness’ which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of our worst appetites and weaknesses—and humanity's ultimately exhilarating spirit.”
“This is a an important book, one that is unafraid to face all of the horror of the century.” - Washington Post
This classic from 1912 stands among the earliest of after the collapse dystopias written by the famous 19th century American author & journalist, Jack London (of “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” fame).
“The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip.
His grandsons are young and live as primeval hunter-gatherers in a heavily depopulated world. Their intellect is limited, as are their language abilities. Edwin asks Smith, whom they call ‘Granser’, to tell them of the disease alternately referred to as scarlet plague, scarlet death, or red death.”
“From the author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a captivating thriller about a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism, which threatens to annihilate human life.
Five prominent biophysicists have warned the United States government that sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, a probe satellite falls to the earth and lands in a desolate region of northeastern Arizona. Nearby, in the town of Piedmont, bodies lie heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise. What could cause such shock and fear? The terror has begun, and there is no telling where it will end. “
There’s also a sequel written by another author:
“A National Bestseller, a NY Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
’By turns a medical thriller, detective story, and paean to city life, Johnson's account of the outbreak and its modern implications is a true page-turner.’ - The Washington Post
‘Thought-provoking.’ - Entertainment Weekly
It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure-garbage removal, clean water, sewers-necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.
In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of disease, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.”
“For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the 14th century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone back in that era. For her instructors in the 21st century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.”
“A stunning novel that encompasses both suffering and hope. . . . The best work yet from one of science fiction’s best writers.” - The Denver Post
“Splendid work—brutal, gripping and genuinely harrowing, the product of diligent research, fine writing and well-honed instincts, that should appeal far beyond the normal science-fiction constituency.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The world of 1348 burns in the mind’s eye, and every character alive that year is a fully recognized being. . . . It becomes possible to feel . . . that Connie Willis did, in fact, over the five years Doomsday Book took her to write, open a window to another world, and that she saw something there.” - The Washington Post Book World
"Required reading for all medical students and anyone looking for a little armchair medical adventure." - Library Journal
“A potent mix of travel memoir, coming-of-age narrative and medical mystery. Donaldson's experiences treating a frighteningly infectious hemorrhagic fever, the strength of his West African patients, and his own grave illness bring him to a contemplation of mortality, poverty, civil war, and medicine as it is practiced in the 1st and 3rd worlds.” - BookBrowse
“Ross Donaldson is one of just a few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world's most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra Leone, on the border of war-struck Liberia, where he struggled to control the spread of Lassa Fever. The words, ‘you know Lassa can kill you, don't you?’ haunted him each day.
With the country in complete upheaval and working conditions suffering, he is forced to make life-and-death decisions alone as a never-ending onslaught of contagious patients flood the hospital. Soon however, he is not only fighting for others but himself when he becomes afflicted with a life threatening disease.
The Lassa Ward is more than just an adventure story about the making of a physician; it is a portrait of the Sierra Leone people and the human struggle of those risking their daily comforts and lives to aid them.”
“An unforgettable tale, set in 17th century England, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague, from the author The Secret Chord and of March, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes, we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a ‘year of wonders.’
Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing an ‘inspiring heroine’ (The Wall Street Journal), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read.”
“Around the world, a deadly outbreak spreads. The CDC and WHO race to stop it, but they soon learn that this pandemic hides a dark secret.
Experience the groundbreaking novel that will change everything you think you know about pandemics—and how to survive one.
‘Reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.’ - The Guardian
100 miles north of Alaska, a US Coast Guard vessel discovers a sunken submarine. It has no national identification and doesn’t match the records of any known vessel. Deep within, researchers find evidence of a scientific experiment that will rewrite our basic understanding of the human race.
In Atlanta, Dr. Peyton Shaw is awakened by the phone call she has dreaded for years. As the CDC’s leading epidemiologist, she’s among the first responders to outbreaks around the world. It’s a lonely and dangerous job, but it’s her life—and she’s good at it. This time, she may have met her match.
In Kenya, an Ebola-like pathogen has infected two Americans. One lies at death’s door. With the clock ticking, Peyton assembles her team joining personnel from the Ministry of Health and the WHO. What they find in the remote village is beyond their worst fears.
In Berlin, Desmond Hughes awakens in a hotel room with no memory of how he got there or who he is. On the floor, he finds a dead security guard from an international pharmaceutical company. His only clue leads him to Peyton Shaw—a woman who seems to know him, but refuses to tell him how. With the police searching the city for him, Desmond desperately tries to piece together what happened to him.
As the pathogen spreads around the world, Peyton and Desmond race to unravel the conspiracy behind the pandemic—and uncover secrets some want to keep buried. With time running out, they face an unimaginable decision.”
Written by a French-Algerian philosopher whose “insistence on placing individual moral responsibility at the heart of all public choices cuts sharply across the comfortable habits of our own age” - NY Review of Books
“The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain.
Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it.
A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague is a classic of twentieth-century literature.”
“Here David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines—and beyond. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. He also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family.
Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor, it revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America. Oshinsky also shows how the polio experience revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America—increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed—the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life.
Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.”
“They weren't ready for the apocalypse but ready or not, it was coming...
Faced with the very real possibility of extinction of the human race, Cole Evans has only one chance to save his family and survive—a safe haven on an isolated, hard to reach island.
No one realizes there's a deadly illness spreading like wildfire until it's too late. With few symptoms, victims literally drop dead after a brief surge of energy. Within days, the virus tears through the population of the United States and the world.
Can Cole convince his brother that the danger is real and that there's enough space for his family as well? And, can they all reach the island before the lights go out for them...forever?”
“Shilts successfully weaves comprehensive investigative reporting and commercial page-turning pacing, political intrigue, and personal tragedy into a landmark book . . . Its importance cannot be overstated.” -Publishers Weekly"
“It is fascinating, frightening, and essential reading.” - San Francisco Sentinel
“Upon it's first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years.
Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.”
Hugo Award Finalist
“WOW! What a superb plot! Darwin's Radio is bloody damned good.” - Anne McCaffrey
“‘Virus hunter’ Christopher Dicken is a man on a mission, following a trail of rumors, government cover-ups, and dead bodies around the globe in search of a mysterious disease that strikes only pregnant women and invariably results in miscarriage. But when Dicken finds what he’s looking for, the answer proves to be stranger—and far deadlier—than he ever could have imagined. Something that has slept in human DNA for millions of years is waking up.
Molecular biologist Kaye Lang has spent her career tracing ancient retroviruses in the human genome. She believes these microscopic fossils can come to life again. But when Dicken’s discovery becomes public, Lang’s theory suddenly turns to chilling fact. As the outbreak of this terrifying disease threatens to become a deadly epidemic, Dicken and Lang must race against time to assemble the pieces of a puzzle only they are equipped to solve—an evolutionary puzzle that will determine the future of the human race . . . if a future exists at all.”
“Superb . . . Bear's novel is frighteningly believable with a lot of clearly explained science, but the personal struggles of the well-realized characters keep everything on a human level.” - Focus
“Absorbing and ingenious.” - Kirkus Reviews
From celebrity chef & the author of Kitchen Confidential comes a well-researched historical narrative
“In 1906, at a prosperous Long Island summer home, a family falls ill and typhoid is diagnosed. When Dr. George Soper is called in to find the source of the contagion, he notices that the household cook has gone missing. She is Mary Mallon, the woman who would become known as Typhoid Mary. Soper, sanitary engineer turned sleuth, sees Mary as his Moriarty. He finds there has been an outbreak of typhoid fever in every household she has worked in over the past decade. Mary is a 'carrier', a seemingly healthy individual who passes on her dangerous germs, sometimes with fatal consequences. Now Soper must hunt the cook down before she can infect more unsuspecting victims. A poor Irish immigrant, Mary refuses to believe that she can harbour typhoid in her strong and healthy body, and she doesn't intend to go quietly.
In this fascinating true story, Bourdain, in an homage from one cook to another, follows Mary through the kitchens of New York, putting a human face to a desperate and unintentional murderer, and examines a time, and a life, with his inimitable style.”
“From Science fiction grandmaster Frank Herbert, creator of the Dune universe, comes this novel of bioterrorism and gendercide.
What if women were an endangered species?
It begins in Ireland, but soon spreads throughout the entire world: a virulent new disease expressly designed to target only women. As fully half of the human race dies off at a frightening pace and life on Earth faces extinction, panicked people and governments struggle to cope with the global crisis. Infected areas are quarantined or burned to the ground. The few surviving women are locked away in hidden reserves, while frantic doctors and scientists race to find a cure. Anarchy and violence consume the planet.
The plague is the work of a solitary individual who calls himself the Madman. As government security forces feverishly hunt for the renegade scientist, he wanders incognito through a world that will never be the same. Society, religion, and morality are all irrevocably transformed by the White Plague.”
“From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War comes a novel set during the Spanish flu pandemic… a story of a family reborn through loss and love.
In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters—Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa—a chance at a better life.
But just months after they arrive, the Spanish Flu reaches the shores of America. As the pandemic claims more than twelve thousand victims in their adopted city, they find their lives left with a world that looks nothing like the one they knew. But even as they lose loved ones, they take in a baby orphaned by the disease who becomes their single source of hope. Amidst the tragedy and challenges, they learn what they cannot live without—and what they are willing to do about it.
As Bright as Heaven is the compelling story of a mother and her daughters who find themselves in a harsh world not of their making, which will either crush their resolve to survive or purify it.”
“In this frighteningly believable thriller from NY Times bestselling author and master storyteller Tosca Lee, an extinct disease re-emerges from the melting Alaskan permafrost and causes madness in its victims. For recent apocalyptic cult escapee Wynter Roth, it’s the end she’d always been told was coming.
When Wynter Roth finally escapes from New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation.
As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life—until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples. That night, Wynter learns there’s something far more sinister at play: that the prophet they once idolized has been toying with the fate of mankind, and that these samples are key to understanding the disease.
Now, as the power grid fails and the nation descends into chaos, Wynter must find a way to get the samples to a lab in Colorado. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter, herself.
Filled with action, conspiracy, romance, and questions of whom—and what—to believe, The Line Between is a high-octane story of survival and love in a world on the brink of madness, from the “queen of psychological twists” (NY Times bestselling author Steena Holmes).”
“Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone.
An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him.
By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.
As months of scavenging and hiding turn to years marked by depression and alcoholism, Robert spends his days hunting his tormentors and researching the cause of their affliction. But the more he discovers about the vampires around him, the more he sees the unsettling truth of who is—and who is not—a monster.
Winner of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award for best vampire novel of the century: the genre-defining classic of horror sci-fi that inspired three films.”
“An instant classic upon its original publication in 1949 and winner of the first International Fantasy Award, Earth Abides ranks as one of our most provocative and finely wrought post-apocalyptic works of literature. Its impact is still fresh, its lessons timeless.
The cabin had always been a special retreat for Isherwood Williams, a haven from the demands of society. But one day while hiking, Ish was bitten by a rattlesnake, and the solitude he had so desired took on dire new significance.
He was sick for days—although, somehow, he never doubted that he'd live through the ordeal. Often delirious, he did awake at one point to find two strangers peering in at him from the cabin door. Yet oddly, instead of offering help, the two ran off as if terrified.
Not long after that, the coughing began. Ish suffered chills followed by fever, and a measles-like rash that had nothing to do with snake bite. He was one of the few people in the world to live through that peculiar malady, but he didn't know it then.
Ish headed home when he finally felt himself again—and noticed the strangeness almost immediately. No cars passed him on the road; the gas station not far from his cabin had an air of abandonment; and he was shocked to see the body of a man lying by the roadside near a small town.
Without a radio or phone, Ish had no idea of humanity's abrupt demise. He had escaped death, yet could not escape the awesomeness of the catastrophe—and, with an eerie detachment, he found himself curious as to how long it would be before all traces of man's civilization faded from the Earth.
At the same time, he couldn't help wondering whether others had survived, and whether even a handful of humans would. But then he finds Em, a wise and courageous woman who coaxes his heart back to life and teaches him to hope again. Together, they will face unimaginable challenges as they sow the seeds of a new beginning.”
“One of the finest of all post-holocaust novels.” - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction