6 Of The Books We’re Reading About, Erm, Viruses

Weirdly comforting.

We all do one of two things in a crisis – some of us run towards it, others of us run away. COVID-19 is very much a crisis and, for many of us, it’s become a thing of such worry and weirdness we’re desperate to avoid thinking about it at all.

If you’re in the former camp though, you’ll be doing the opposite – constantly probing at its heart and its edges, trying to get a closer grasp of what exactly it is we’re living through. Books, you’ll find, are your friends. After all, diseases have provided fodder for writers and researchers for centuries, eager to get a handle on their nature, to detail the toll they have on human lives and, in some cases, to use them as metaphors for wider ideas.

Here we’ve pulled together a few suggestions of books that abide by the viral theme; ones that could just offer you a few doses of clarity, context and even comfort in this very odd hour of need.

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Philip Roth’s Nemesis
Set in 1940s New Jersey, Roth’s final novel focuses on a polio epidemic that rips through a close-knit community. While the outbreak is on a smaller scale than the pandemic we’re currently contending with, the book’s themes of fear, panic, bewilderment and, importantly, love are surely familiar today.

Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone
Told with the page-turning pace of a thriller, this New York Times bestseller explores the extremely infectious and highly lethal Ebola and Marburg viruses, and discusses the possible origins of AIDS. Written in 1994, Preston’s prescient ending predicts the return of Ebola – 20 years before it broke out once again in West Africa.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
A flu pandemic which wipes out most of the global population is the premise for Mandel’s award-winning novel, and provides the basis for meditations on the endurance of culture even as society collapses, through its focus on a wandering band of actors known as the Travelling Symphony.

John M Barry’s The Great Influenza
World War I was responsible for the deaths of around 40 million people, but in the final year of the conflict, 1918, its death toll was dwarfed not by more bombs and guns, but by a disease: the Spanish Flu. Barry’s fascinating book tells the story of how this pandemic spread, infecting about a quarter of the world’s population and possibly killing as many as 100 million.

Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite
Thanks to its unsettling exploration of life on another planet – GP, or Jeep – and the endemic virus present there that kills off any potential colonisers, Griffith’s novel was a sci-fi prize-winner. Underlying explorations of gender politics add extra interest and make the book still relevant today.

Jose Saramago’s Blindness
In this allegorical tale from Portuguese Nobel Laureate Saramago, a city is afflicted by a mysterious disease that renders its unfortunate sufferers blind. Brilliantly told, Blindness reflects many of modern history’s ills and extremes, from concentration camps to the excesses of capitalism.

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