In this riveting medical thriller–from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author–Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees.
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons–microbiologist, epidemiologist–travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city . . . A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare . . . Already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic . . . Henry’s wife, Jill, and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta . . . And the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions–scientific, religious, governmental–and decimating the population. As packed with suspense as it is with the fascinating history of viral diseases, Lawrence Wright has given us a full-tilt, electrifying, one-of-a-kind thriller.
Reviews
Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event
“Whew! A compelling read up to the last sentence. Wright has come up with a story worthy of Michael Crichton. In an eerily calm, matter-of-fact way, and backed by meticulous research, he imagines what the world would actually be like in the grip of a devastating new virus.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] multifaceted thriller…Wright pulls few punches and imbues even walk-on characters with enough humanity that their fate will matter to readers. This timely literary page-turner shows Wright is on a par with the best writers in the genre.”
Douglas Preston, The New York Times Book Review
“[Wright] applies the magisterial force of his reporting skills into spinning a novel of pestilence, war, and social collapse that, given the current pandemic, cuts exceedingly close to the bone…Chilling.”
Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
“A swift and all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation that moves from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to the U.S. as it eerily evokes real-life current events.”
Scott Detrow, NPR
“A fast-paced thriller with big, sweeping, made-for-the-adapted-screenplay action sequences…The End of October is the perfect novel for a long airplane flight or a beach chair.”
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A maniacal page-turner…It read[s] as if it’s been shot out of a cannon.”
Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“[The End of October] imagines a global pandemic in which an unfamiliar virus works its way around the world, leaving economic meltdown, conspiracy theories, and mass death in its wake…The propulsive plot is counterweighted with rigorous, gracefully presented context on the history and behavior of diseases.”