The End of October
A novel
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- USD 5.99
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- USD 5.99
Publisher Description
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 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For the hero of Lawrence Wright’s gripping thriller, studying infectious diseases like Ebola and SARS is all in a day’s work. When a deadly new strain emerges from an Indonesian internment camp, brilliant and empathetic WHO epidemiologist Henry Parsons and his colleagues put their lives on the line to protect the world from a global outbreak. Wright—author of the chilling 9/11 history The Looming Tower—is a meticulous novelist, fortifying the action with impeccable research and terrifyingly realistic details. The End of October takes us on a white-knuckle trip around the world as governments and international organizations struggle to contain a disease that threatens the very fabric of modern society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
