Within days, people die en masse around the world. But when an inadvertently exposed taxi driver makes the hajj – the Islamic holy pilgrimage to Mecca – along with 3 million other people, all bets for containing the spread are off. The Kongoli camp is quarantined and swarmed by various health agencies that are, like Henry, veterans of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa. Wright’s writing is clinical and unblinking – you stare into chest cavities, at lungs subsumed in fluid, at bodies turned blue by cyanosis, or lack of oxygen. Competence and expertise serve as its compass Wright’s American protagonist, Dr Henry Parsons, is a cunning, emotionally clamped virologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), outrunning a shady past at a secret lab in Maryland’s Fort Detrick.Īlarmed by a mass die-off in an Indonesian political concentration camp for young gay men, Henry travels to Jakarta, where he discovers “Kongoli virus”, named after the camp, a gruesome new form of hemorrhagic influenza. It’s weird.” The End of October, which Lawrence began writing in 2017 (his final draft was submitted in summer 2019), is a deeply researched scenario-play of a novel – the world faced with a 1918 Spanish flu-type pathogen – told in brisk, unsparing prose. Whenever I open the paper it feels like I’m reading my own book. “It was meant to be a warning cry, when we weren’t buffeted by all this dire news. “It’s unnerving” Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer-winning journalist, told the Guardian on the surreal fortune of releasing a global pandemic novel during a global pandemic.

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