The End of October: A novel

by Lawrence Wright

Overview

“An eerily prescient novel about a devastating virus that begins in Asia before going global . . . A page-turner that has the earmarks of an instant bestseller.” —New York Post
 
“Featuring accounts of past plagues and pandemics, descriptions of pathogens and how they work, and dark notes about global warming, the book produces deep shudders . . . A disturbing, eerily timed novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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.” —Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone

“This timely literary page-turner shows Wright is on a par with the best writers in the genre.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525658658
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/28/2020
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	648,105
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas, and one previous novel, God's Favorite. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

Hometown:

Austin, Texas

Date of Birth:

August 2, 1947

Place of Birth:

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Education:

B.A., Tulane University, 1969; M.A. (Applied Linguistics), American University in Cairo, 1971

Website:

http://www.lawrencewright.com

Read an Excerpt

Dear Readers,
 
The events depicted in The End of October were meant to serve as a cautionary tale. But real life doesn’t always wait for warnings. As I write, the entire world is enveloped in a viral disease much like the one I imagined within these pages. 
 
It’s been said that the book is a kind of prophecy, but I see it simply as the result of careful research. I asked the question: what is the gravest threat to human civilization? Nuclear war and global warming are existential threats, but throughout history diseases have periodically capsized societies. A century has passed since the 1918 “Spanish” flu that killed between fifty and a hundred million people. What if something like that returned, in our time, where travel is rapid and cities are densely populated and public health has receded as a primary concern?
 
I have applied the same rigorous standards that I bring to my nonfiction. Nothing presented here as factual is invented. I interviewed many scientists and epidemiologists who are now at the forefront of America’s effort to constrain the pandemic. As for the geopolitics I describe, I merely extended trends I observed in the world to certain logical conclusions. I spoke to top government officials and military figures. Everyone I spoke to shared the concerns I expressed herein—something like this could happen. And now it has.
 
Of course, this book is a novel. One with heroes and villains and a clock ticking in the background. It was exciting to research and to write, and what I learned gave me hope about our institutions and the people who are working to shield us from catastrophe. I was particularly impressed by the ingenuity and courage of the people who have dedicated their lives to public health. It is to them that the novel is dedicated.
 
I hope you enjoy it.
 
Lawrence Wright

Editorial Reviews

The sweeping, authoritative and genuinely intelligent thriller—the sort of novel in which the author employs a bulldozer and a scalpel at the same time—is a rare specimen. Lawrence Wright's second novel, The End of October, is one of these. The fact that it's about the world in shock and ruin because of a virus similar to Covid-19 makes it read as if it's been shot out of a cannon…What [Wright] offers…is a great deal of learning about viruses and their attendant political and social horrors; learning that he injects into a maniacal page-turner. He offers the joy of competence—his own as a writer, and the scientific and moral competence of many of the characters he's invented…Wright's novel is…real if solemn entertainment, a stay against boredom and a kind of offered prayer for the best in us to rise to the surface.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 03/09/2020

On a trip to the site of an “unusual cluster of adolescent fatalities in a refugee camp” in Indonesia, World Health Organization doctor Henry Parsons, the hero of this multifaceted thriller from Pulitzer Prize winner Wright (God Save Texas), discovers the compound decimated by an unknown disease. Parsons sounds the alarm that the virus responsible may have spread after learning that his driver, who went inside the camp, was allowed to leave the area. The stakes rise when Parsons finds out that the driver was headed for Saudi Arabia to participate in a pilgrimage to Mecca, thus potentially exposing millions to the fatal infection. Meanwhile, the Saudis and Iranians are at each other’s throats, and a career NSC official fears that Putin’s Russia is preparing a cyberattack that would cripple the U.S. 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. Author tour. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2020-03-02
As a lethal virus of unknown origin ravages huge swaths of the planet, legendary American disease fighter Henry Parsons heads up increasingly hopeless attempts to control it.

The easily transmitted disease, which literally turns its victims blue, is first detected in a refugee camp in Indonesia, "hothouse of diseases." Sent there by the World Health Organization, Parsons quickly recognizes the dangers at hand but not quickly enough to prevent his infected local driver from leaving the camp to join some 3 million worshipers on the annual hajj. When attempts at quarantines in Mecca fail and the infected pilgrims return home, they carry the disease all over the globe. In light of the relatively few disease-related deaths in Russia, suspicions arise that the virus was bioengineered by Putin. The Russian leader, of course, blames America, where cities and institutions begin crumbling. After blood drips from the eyes of the president, midspeech, and the vice president is infected, the ill-prepared government is driven into an underground facility in Virginia. (CNN's Anderson Cooper apparently perishes but not Wolf Blitzer, who still commands The Situation Room.) Featuring accounts of past plagues and pandemics, descriptions of pathogens and how they work, and dark notes about global warming, the book produces deep shudders. Wright, author of acclaimed nonfiction such as The Looming Tower (2006), about the Sept. 11 attacks, knows his way around geopolitical terror, but he's less successful as a thriller writer, upstaged here by the recent, real-life coronavirus. There is little true suspense in the novel, which sketches in its nightmarish scenarios rather than dramatizing them. Even a suicide bombing has marginal impact. Ultimately, the book gets caught up in family drama, sentimentality, and end-of-the-world moralizing. An atheist since his missionary parents were killed in an air crash, Parsons rediscovers religion.

A disturbing, eerily timed novel but no page-turner.

Kirkus Reviews

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.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“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.” 
—NPR

“A maniacal page-turner. . . . It read[s] as if it’s been shot out of a cannon.”
—The New York Times

“[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.” 
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[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.” 
—The Atlantic
 
“A deeply researched scenario-play of a novel told in brisk, unsparing prose. . . . There’s a compulsive thrill to reading a book which grazes, and then runs off with, our increasingly ungraspable reality.” 
—The Guardian
  
“Some works of fiction seem ripped from the headlines. Others anticipate the news, providing a prophetic vision of our future. Lawrence Wright's new novel, The End of October, belongs in the rare second category.” 
—CNN
 
“What makes The End of October compelling to read right now is that Wright researched the hell out of what kind of infrastructure the US would need to survive a pandemic. He concluded that we did not have it. And then he drew on his formidable knowledge of domestic and international politics to imagine what would ensue. . . . Wright is undoubtedly a gifted reporter and observer of the world.” 
—Vox
 
“Harrowing. . . . Wright is excellent at gracefully working the science of viruses into the narrative. . . . The second half is almost pure action—pure, heart-stopping action. . . . This book will wake you up, and keep you awake.” 
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“As captivating as it is disorienting. . . . Even taken as speculative fiction, the author approaches his subject with gravity befitting the stakes. . . . Throughout, Wright keeps the various threads pulled taut—medicine, military matters, international intrigue, economics.”
—The Texas Observer
 
“A thriller for our times. . . . Like all good thrillers, The End of October diverts us from the real world while keeping a firm base there, letting us imagine not only disaster but the ways out of it.” 
—Tampa Bay Times
 
“[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.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

Narrator Mark Bramhall keeps to a firm pace in a story that is often heavily factual and scientific. Many listeners are already familiar with Lawrence Wright’s own narration of his prize-winning LOOMING TOWER, which charted the events leading up to 9/11. Wright’s new novel about the global spread of a killer virus couldn’t be better—or worse—timed, and for that alone benefits from the choice of an experienced narrator. Bramhall animates a storyline that’s all too real, and all too close to home, and he lends intimacy and immediacy to the epic melodrama that has now become present reality. Any other time—even six months ago—this would have been an urgent cautionary tale. Now, alas, it’s the morning’s news. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MAY 2020 - AudioFile

Narrator Mark Bramhall keeps to a firm pace in a story that is often heavily factual and scientific. Many listeners are already familiar with Lawrence Wright’s own narration of his prize-winning LOOMING TOWER, which charted the events leading up to 9/11. Wright’s new novel about the global spread of a killer virus couldn’t be better—or worse—timed, and for that alone benefits from the choice of an experienced narrator. Bramhall animates a storyline that’s all too real, and all too close to home, and he lends intimacy and immediacy to the epic melodrama that has now become present reality. Any other time—even six months ago—this would have been an urgent cautionary tale. Now, alas, it’s the morning’s news. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MAY 2020 - AudioFile