Pandemic books

I just finished “Pandemic” by Robin Cook. Looking for recommendations on other pandemic related books.

Touchstone
Pandemic

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks
A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe
The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

I thought The Great Influenza was fascinating when I read it a decade or so ago. It might be even more interesting now.

For nonfiction, Richard Preston has written about both Ebola and smallpox.

A slower paced but excellent novel about a pandemic is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

In historical fiction, I recently read The Winter Station, which is about a historical plague pandemic in Kharbin on the Russian-Chinese border.

Edit to fix touchstones

>5 sparemethecensor: Yeah, Richard Preston wrote The Hot Zone which was the basis for the movie "Outbreak." Not necessarily specific to a pandemic, but pretty gripping stuff, and a bit gross at times.

Shortly after I read The Hot Zone, I also happened to pick up Daniel Kalla's Pandemic that happened to be at the grocery store till. It wasn't bad though not as good at The Hot Zone (also fiction) but not something I would read more than once. Basic plot is virus plus terrorism relevant to the time frame.

There are a lot of books called "Pandemic" so that's an easy search to just look at stuff.

A friend had recommended Spillover which was written several years ago, but it is too scary for me to read now.

>7 vwinsloe: I read it in April, and thought it was really good. It's a scary topic, but the writing doesn't try to make it scarier. In my review I quoted,
"Yes, we are all gonna die. Yes. We are all gonna pay taxes and we are all gonna die. Most of us, though, will probably die of something more mundane than a new virus. "

The book I bought this year, but am avoiding (like the plague) is The Plague.

>7 vwinsloe:

Read it - it is scary but not in a bad way - despite the author being a journalist, he does not try to go for the sensational and scary. I read it a few years ago and I wish more people read it. To quote the end of my review (from 2015):
"It is the proper mix between adventure and science and history to work - and it lacks ANY of the paranoia that similar books tend to contain. It is reporting - from decades of work and centuries of history with one question at the end - what will be the next one. And as I already mentioned, that is the answer that we may never find until it actually happens."

5 years later and yep, the next one did show up and we did not see it coming until it got us.

>8 MarthaJeanne: & >9 AnnieMod: Thanks. Maybe I should give it a try.

The Mira Grant novella Kingdom of needle and bone is all about a flu-like pandemic and vaccinations.

The End of October by Lawrence Wright (fiction) was good. It was also released this year (2020).

>12 ValerieAndBooks: Coincidentally, The New Yorker has devoted nearly its entire Jan. 4 issue to Lawrence Wright's nonfiction dissection of what went wrong with the pandemic response in the U.S. response to the coronavirus. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year

PANDEMIC: TRACKING CONTAGIONS, FROM CHOLERA TO EBOLA AND BEYOND by SONIA SHAH
DEADLIEST ENEMY: OUR WAR AGAINST KILLER GERMS by MICHAEL T. OSTERHOLM

Der Wal und das Ende der Welt by John Ironmonger

Sarah Pinkser's A Song For a New Day is set post pandemics in a world where in-person social gatherings and live music are no longer acceptable.
Mary Robinette Kowal's The Relentless Moon includes an outbreak on the moon.
Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern is about a pandemic and the push to vaccinate an entire planet before the flu mutates again.
The Trespassers by Meg Mundell is about an outbreak on an migrant worker ship after pandemics have stopped most international travel.

Feed, and the rest of the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant, is set in a world where a pandemic from the accidental combination of two modified viruses has led to a zombie plague.

In addition to the great suggestions already made, I'll add:
Severance by Ling Ma
The Stand by Stephen King
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

I recently read Chris Bohjalian's The Red Lotus and in my notes said it was a little too pandemic-y for me. Little did he know. Same goes for Lawrence Wright who published a novel this year, The End of October, about a "virus bringing the world to its knees." I may read it ... but not anytime soon.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Set after a flu pandemic has depopulated much of the earth. I'm not sure I could read it now.

>20 Lynsey2: Oh yes! That's a great one.

Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. In this book the Black Death is more deadly leaving Europe virtually unpopulated, the author goes on to explore what happens in the following centuries.

fever 1793 by Laurie Anderson
the pull of the stars, Emma Donoghue

>13 rosalita: Thank you for sharing that link. A very comprehensive look at the COVID-related events of 2020.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

For nonfiction, I'd recommend Pandemic Century by Mark Honigsbaum.

For fiction, I really liked The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker.

You'll have to wait until May, but The Premonition is coming from Michael Lewis: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/28/michael-lewis-reveals-next-book-pr...

Pale Rider by Laura Spinney is about the Spanish flu in 1918.

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland and To Calais In Ordinary Time by James Meek are both historic fiction about the black death.

My brother is currently reading Scalzi's Lock In which takes place during and after a pandemic.

Agnes at the End of the World a religious cult and a pandemic!

Lockdown, Peter May. Thriller.
Originally rejected by publishers as being too unrealistic. Little did they know.

I am currently reading Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome by John Scalzi. A prequel to Lock In. Not bad.

>35 EntradaPublishing:. I’ve flagged your post as Spam because it leads to a sales site. Please use touchstones that direct to the LT page.

>35 EntradaPublishing: To create a touchstone for a series, surround the name of the series and with three straight brackets on each side (using the opening and closing brackets)...

Fall of the Cities by Vance Huxley

Use only one bracket on each side to search through individual works and two to search through authors.

EntradaPublishing:

And, of course, your assessment of that particular series is utterly unaffected by who published it. And you must just have forgotten that it doesn't actually seem to include an actual pandemic in your eagerness to promote something you published in a way that *just* skirts being inappropriate.

You aren't fooling anyone.

Uhura's Song by Janet Kagan features an epidemic, but the main plot has to do with the Enterprise tracing the colony's original homeworld and trying to get help from them to find out what the disease was like *before* it mutated so badly.

Might not satisfy, because the cultural / historical stuff and trying to get the homeworld's people to cooperate is the main plot rather than the medical work itself.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (yes, Jurassic Park's author, but this is from way back) is trying to *prevent* the titular organism from really getting loose. Main plot is set in a very secure US government laboratory.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Time of the Fourth Horseman is a pandemic but probably not available as an ebook, and it was written long enough ago that it's got the then-popular overpopulation issue as part of the plot.

If you're interested in the field of emergent diseases I recommend The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, it covers a lot of ground but quite interesting.

I'm surprised there wasn't more talk about Albert Camus , The Plague in this forum. I read this classic in 2023 June well after the worst of the pandemic is over. I also worked in Pharma during Covid. It is a beautiful book to read about humans and their 'shackled impotence, waiting their turn' to die. I only wish the book had atleast ONE woman character and also included non-European origin characters from Algeria.

Personally recommend Briar's Book by Tamora Pierce, the whole Circle of Magic series is fantastic, but this one specifically touches on an epidemic. Not really a pandemic, but it hit me rather close to home when I reread the Circle series over Covid.
(I tried to set touchstones for the book itself, but it wasn't working for some reason.)

I can't believe I didn't put in (nonfiction) Justinian's Flea which is a history of the Byzantine empire being poised for expansion when a plague hit so hard their population numbers and infrastructure never entirely recovered. It's 80% byzantium and 20% pandemic as far as I remember, mind.

Edited to try one more time to make the touchstone work

World Without Cats by Bonham Richards
This is a well-written medical thriller with a twist: the deadly pandemic threatens to wipe out felines not humans. As the disease, a combination of FeLv and Ebola, spreads, the world’s population of cats plummets. Unexpected problems ensue, including the spread of deadly rodent and avian diseases. Besides a medical thriller, this is a horror story for cat lovers and illustrates how important cats are to the ecosystem.

The White Plague (1982) by Frank Herbert

Lady Tan's Circle of Women was written during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is historical fiction set in China slightly before and after 1500. A major plot point was a small pox epidemic and variolation.