The End of October

Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction author Lawrence Wright has dived into speculative but well-researched fiction with what many reviewers (The New York Times,  The Guardian, Vox, Slate, The Atlantic) call an "eerily prescient" account of a global pandemic. CDC expert Henry Parsons is asked by the WHO to investigate a cluster of deaths in an Indonesian detention camp for gay men. Before Henry can even report back on the horrendous and highly contagious disease he encounters there, an infected man is on his way to pilgrimage at Mecca--the annual gathering of over 3 million faithful Muslims. Even the harshest measures are insufficient to keep people from returning to their homes after the outbreak, spreading the disease far and wide.
Henry is one of the people who needs to be working on understanding the virus in order to treat or prevent it, but is instead caught up in a worldwide travel ban, unable to return to his family in Atlanta or get access to the research and lab facilities he needs. Focusing mainly on the Middle East and the United States, Wright talks about the breakdown first of civility--neighbors don't help neighbors in a pandemic; they are afraid of them--and then of society, he paints a picture that seems all too familiar from today's headlines.
The New York Times says that what distinguishes Wright's book from a large body of pandemic based fiction is "deep, thorough research... In writing the novel, he interviewed scientists, epidemiologists, government officials and military officers. His understanding of world affairs, Middle East gossip, politics and governmental ineptitude is exceptional." And he weaves his story together with illustrative non-fiction; for example, he details "accounts of historical epidemics, descriptions of Russian cyber- and biowarfare capabilities, the story of the 1803 attempt to save the New World from smallpox..." (NYT)
NPR says of Wright's digressions into discussing pandemics throughout history that "we readers are currently in the market for exactly that: Every single fact a great reporter like Wright has learned about pandemics."
The Washington Post picks out a quote from the book that sounds like it could have come from Dr. Fauci's daily briefings: "Typically, with a pandemic, you have two or three big waves of contagion before it settles down and becomes the normal flu you get every year. That lasts till the next pandemic comes along. So if this one is like the 1918 flu, the really big wave will hit in October. But of course, we don’t know what this one will do.” Whether or not you think it is a good thing to imagine the outcome of a global pandemic while living in the middle of one is a personal decision. Even the author has mixed feelings. In an interview with The New Yorker, he says, “In some ways, I have to admit, I’m kind of proud that I imagined things that, in real life, seem to be coming into existence...On the other hand, I feel embarrassed to have written this and have it come out.”
I was engrossed and carried along by the story as well as the history and science.