It might seem counterintuitive, but as the world finds itself in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, books about fictional pandemics, plagues and other diseases have suddenly risen in popularity.
“The Plague” by Albert Camus saw a huge increase in sales across Europe, according to The Guardian.
- 226 copies of the novel were sold in the United Kingdom in February 2019
- 371 copies were sold in February 2020
- But in the first three weeks of March 2020, the book had already sold 2,156 copies.
Not only books, but movies about global pandemics have seen a new surge of popularity, such as the 2011 film “Contagion,” the Deseret News reported last month.
For some people, these stories help to put current events “in perspective” and to “explore the anxieties and fears” they may be experiencing, Dr. Kyle Bishop, a professor of English at Southern Utah University, told the Deseret News.
If diving into a story about a fictional pandemic while in the middle of an actual one is what you need to keep your anxiety in check — or if you’re just curious — here’s a list of eight books that explore pandemics and their aftermath in a variety of different ways.
‘The Last Man’ by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley is best known as the author of “Frankenstein,” but she also wrote the first major post-apocalyptic novel. “The Last Man” was written in 1826 but is set in the 21st century, where a global pandemic ends up killing everyone on Earth — except for Lionel Verney, who becomes the world’s only survivor. Shelley was 28 years old and grieving the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, when she wrote “The Last Man.” Writing the novel “was her attempt to reconcile herself to the tragedies of life without losing hope in humanity itself,” Eileen Hunt Botting, a professor political science at Notre Dame, wrote for The New York Times.
‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus
“The Plague” has been written about everywhere from The New York Times to NPR to The Wall Street Journal since the coronavirus pandemic began. The novel follows the efforts of a doctor to contain the spread of a plague in the North African town of Oran. Although it is sometimes considered to be an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France, it is also a story about how humans react in the face of adversity and tragedy.
‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel
A famous actor dies onstage in the middle of performing “King Lear” on the same night that a deadly disease called the “Georgia Flu” begins to spread around the world. The pandemic causes the end of civilization as we know it, and the novel moves back and forth in time to “before” and “after” to explore its effect on the characters. The story centers on a traveling theater troupe that performs works of Shakespeare in some of the few villages that are left and struggles to keep art alive when civilization is gone. “Station Eleven” is also being developed as a miniseries for HBO Max.
‘The Stand’ by Stephen King
A patient escapes from a testing facility and carries with him a mutated strain of super-flu that ends up killing 99% of the world’s population. The people that are left must decide who will become their new leader — an 108-year-old woman named Mother Abigail who encourages peace, or the violent “Dark Man” Randall Flagg. Published in 1978, “The Stand” has been on Amazon’s top 20 most read book list for the last five weeks and is also in the process of being made into a miniseries for CBS All Access.
Cinder’ by Marissa Meyer
The first of the “Lunar Chronicles” series, “Cinder” is a retelling of “Cinderella” set in the futuristic New Beijing where a deadly plague has been spreading. Cinder is a cyborg who is blamed when one of her stepsisters catches the disease and is forced into quarantine. She meets the handsome prince and attends the ball, but also finds out that she might hold the key to saving both her city and the world.
‘Blindness’ by Jose Saramajo
This novel tells the story of a different kind of epidemic — an epidemic that causes the inhabitants of an entire city to go blind. Author Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in literature shortly after writing “Blindness,” “describes disaster’s potential to bring out both the best and worst of people,” according to NPR.
‘The End of October’ by Lawrence Wright
This novel about a viral pandemic is being released at the end of April, which has caused it to be called “prescient” and “eerily timed” by reviewers. “The End of October” follows a doctor who is investigating a mysterious virus that is spreading around the world. However, author Lawrence Wright wrote for The New York Times that “what may seem like prophecy” in the novel “is actually the fruit of research.” Wright spoke to a variety of health experts as he prepared to write the novel in order to gain as much realism in the story as he could.
‘The Great Influenza’ by John Barry
“The Great Influenza” has spent the last four weeks on Amazon’s “most sold” book list, for understandable reasons. This nonfiction book goes into the history of the 1918 influenza and “provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon,” according to the summary on Amazon.