An Instant New York Times Bestseller From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal)At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the … When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution.
As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.
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This book was published at the end of April of 2020! Obviously the actual writing and conceptualization occurred months/years before that date. Be aware you are reading a work of fiction, but…this is the seminal case of art imitating real life.
In this book a pandemic originates in Asia and is responsible for a killer virus that spreads through travel throughout the world. Unpreparedness, stubbornness, and disbelief lead to it dissemination and world destruction. Warring nations retaliate, the Haj at Mecca becomes a central issue, and on and on. Wright is a non fiction writer who did a superb job on “the Looming Tower” about 9/11,a ( a favorite of mine), “Going Clear” about the church of Scientology.
The similarities with what we are experiencing with Covid 19 are eerily near identical. Some have called Wright prescient, I think he is simply aware and forward thinking. Don’t misunderstand, parts of this novel are melodramatic and hyperbolic, but the research and the science are spot on. A fascinating read if you are up to it. You will wear your mask afterwards, trust me!
Excellent story that was written pre-Covid-19-pandemic, about a pandemic that is much worse than 2020-2021, but explores a world turned upside down by an unknown disease.
COVID got you down? Need to read something that will make you feel better? This may not be the book for you–unless you count seeing how much worse it could be among the things that will make you feel better. This is the tale of another novel coronavirus that rampages across the globe, but it packs way more of a punch. Here “the end of October” is, well, possibly the end of us. But for the grace of the virus gods, there go we…
Full review: https://skryder.com/2021/03/07/review-the-end-of-october/
This was a fun read, and I was very with it up until the end; everything seemed very rushed.
A race-against-time thriller as one man must find the origins for a new killer virus that has brought the world to it’s knees.
I’ve not read many “end of the world” or “plague” type thrillers in the last eighteen months or so for the simple reason it feels rather like we’re currently living on one of those stories and I’m feeling pretty weary of it all. But I kept on seeing good reviews for this novel and it’s in a bunch of the stores lately so I finally caved in and bought a copy because I usually really enjoy them. I’m pleased I did because this was a good story – even if many factors of it hit rather close to home right now.
Considering this book was written before Covid-19 was a reality – let alone in pretty much every major headline worldwide – I feel the author did a remarkable job, both with his research but also with a pretty fair guess as to how a lot of the politics and medical bodies worldwide would react. A major factor in my enjoyment of this story was also that even though the book is quite political and medical focused – as you would expect in a plague type of mystery-thriller story – I feel all the major characters were highly relatable. The author has a really good and relaxed style of voice and writing and this made many of the characters really enjoyable to me, I could easily empathize with them and the situation they found themselves in and even some of the smaller characters, like Bambang, who were from a different culture, a different religion and a completely different walk of life, the author showcased Bambang in such a way I could not just see where his choices and actions came from, but why he made these decisions and I could easily relate to him despite our lives being completely different. It was a lovely feeling and really got me hooked into the story.
I admit I found the start of the story (maybe the first quarter of it or less) was a little slow moving. I strongly feel readers should stick with it though because there are a number of different, complex working parts to this story (different medical facilities, different parts of the world that are extremely important and different government/political regimes) that all need to be lined up, explained and laid out in order for the reader to fully grasp how all the dominoes fall once the virus gets out of control. Understandably there are a number of different things that all happen in tandem that need to be followed and having it all lined up correctly in the beginning is crucial. So while a part of me could see the pandemic begin to flourish and I wanted to go faster and faster the author did an excellent job really getting everything outlined clearly and all the characters introduced and ready for the explosion to occur.
In many respects this is simply a really well written pandemic story but in the current circumstances I find my enjoyment and tolerance for these stories fairly short. So the fact I really enjoyed this is testament to how well it’s written and how gripping I found the tale. Better still there is a solid “wrap up” and explanation at the end and while it was a bit of a twist (and dealt with very quickly) I was pleased that those loose ties were indeed wrapped up and we weren’t left hanging not really knowing how the outbreak happened. I’m not sure all readers will be as pleased as I was with the ending – and while I didn’t guess it, I would expect some readers probably will, but it was nice to not have dangling threads of plot and wondering for a while after I’d finished the book.
A solid and enjoyable read and one I will likely come back to another time.
Lawrence Wright shows incredible prescience by publishing a novel about the outbreak of a pandemic in April 2020, just as Covid-19 was creating worldwide havoc and lockdowns. He must have finished writing the novel well before the first infections were detected in China. In fact he has said that the book originated ten years earlier when Ridley Scott asked him for a screenplay about the collapse of civilization. Scott didn’t use the screenplay. But in 2018 Wright decided to turn this story that wouldn’t go away into a novel.
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Besides screenplays, he has written ten books of nonfiction, including his account of the origins of Al Queda, The Looming Tower, an impressive work that won a Pulitzer Prize. This is his second novel.
Fiction is not his natural oeuvre. He is a scrupulous researcher who offers the reader a plethora of information about the behavior of pathogens. But this means that too often characters spend paragraphs filling in the reader with scientific background material that is psychologically inappropriate. Humans don’t talk to one another this way.
At the same time the screenwriter in Wright weaves a sensational plot into the narrative of the spreading pandemic that stylistically resembles Tom Clancy, and involves bioweapons, cyberwarfare and an apocalyptic finale.
The main story concerns Henry Parsons, a leading epidemiologist working for the CDC. Investigating an outbreak of an unknown flu virus in Indonesia, he lets his Muslim driver depart on a haj to Saudi Arabia where he spreads the virus to his fellow pilgrims, who quickly take it to all the corners of the earth.
Henry spends the rest of the novel trying to find an antidote. Leaving his family to face the pandemic alone, he spends time in Saudi Arabia unsuccessfully attempting to quarantine the Mecca pilgrims, and returns to an America devastated by the virus and a massive cyber-attack in a nuclear submarine in which sailors are dying from the virus.
Although Wright does a good job trying to provide a layman’s interpretation of epidemiological terms, he can’t escape them. Attempting to identify the pathogen, Henry and other medical experts say things like, “It’s something in the Orthomyxoviridae family,” and “There were no neuraminidase proteins.” The problem is that this vocabulary doesn’t sit well with that of the thriller, such as, “Torpedo in the water!” and “For a starter, you should have him killed.”
There are two competing narratives in this book. Each is well done. But they do conflict with one another at times. That doesn’t stop the novel from being mostly a page-turner and a highly credible account of a pandemic. Happily Covid-19 hasn’t turned out to be as devastating as this dystopian novel’s pathogen. So far, at least.
I just read this book for a book club I am a part of tonight. It is so timely with regards to what has been happening in 2020. And, that is what scares me. It is a quick read that sucked me in from the first pages. And taking a look at this year and what has been happening, I think we read a precursor of what will come.
Great story. The only issue? I would’ve expected characters to be profoundly changed by their experience.
If you took out the history of viruses, US/Russia relations, and the inner workings of domestic politics from this book, you would have a somewhat compelling novella.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Lawrence Wright makes his 2nd foray into fiction and it didn’t really work for me. There are moments that stretch believability and in one instance, an irrelevant flashback that only serves to pad the anemic story.
That said, it’s a timely one!
This contemporary medical thriller must have been written last year, but it’s incredibly prescient about the viral pandemic we’re going through. From how it started, to the way it spread, to the response of various countries – including America’s own denial of the seriousness of it until it was too late. It goes into the closing of businesses, the reopening too soon – it’s almost like we’ve been following his plot line in real life like a user’s manual. It then takes the situation much farther, with all too plausible results like countries accusing each other of starting it, and then accidentally falling into wars over it. Pretty grim – one can only hope we don’t actually end up there. Wright does a nice job of mixing the personal stories with the geopolitical, as well. Not a book to read before bed, though – it will give you nightmares.
As a person who devours all things corona virus related, I found this book impossible to put down. It is a fictional worst-case pandemic senario. That has a few hits on the current situation. It is a very interesting parallel reality read.
It’s difficult to believe The End of October was written just before the *ish* hit the global fan a couple months ago.
If I’d read The End of October, say, last fall, I’d have said “Cool speculative fiction, but wow, people wouldn’t suck that bad in a crisis, would they?”
Now I’m just nodding and thinking “Yep. That happened. And that too. We didn’t measure up any better.”
Lawrence Wright pretty much nailed the political finger-pointing and lack of preparedness, the world economy deterioration, the fear, the cover-ups, the shameful selfishness, everything. We know how realistic this book is and how well Wright predicted the world’s reaction to a pandemic because IT JUST HAPPENED AND IT’S STILL HAPPENING. We didn’t experience (yet?) the population decimating extreme of his book — since Kongoli launches from a massive pilgrimage to Mecca and spreads by those pilgrims to every populated area on the planet in the blink of an eye — but still, it rings all too true. Almost four million times true, and very definitely still counting.
I need time to absorb this. I blazed through this book, the bulk of it yesterday and today, because I couldn’t put it down. Absolutely marking this as one of this year’s favorites, and possibly will need to re-read. There’s a lot to learn here.