Pandemic Reads

It's been 5 years since COVID-19. The list below covers a range of pandemics both real and imaginary.

Updated March 17, 2025
F
Fond du Lac Public Library
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
Fourteen days : a literary project of the Authors Guild of America
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
Set in a Lower East Side tenement in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Fourteen Days is an irresistibly propulsive collaborative novel from the Authors Guild, with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of New York neighbors has been secretly written by...
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The first volume in the internationally acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future--from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments A Kirkus...
The windup girl
Bacigalupi, Paolo
Paper Book
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko. Emiko is the Windup Girl, a...
The spare room : a novel
Bartz, Andrea
Paper Book
Staying with a friend and her husband is sexier--and deadlier--than anyone could have imagined, in this "delightfully salacious" (Shondaland) domestic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese's Book Club pick We Were Never Here. "A...
The mad, mad murders of Marigold Way : a novel
Benson, Raymond
Paper Book
2022 FOREWORD INDIES Book Award Finalist! From internationally acclaimed and best-selling author RAYMOND BENSON comes a wry and darkly comedic work in which a quaint suburb of Chicago finds itself rocked by more than just the uncertainties of 2020. Perfect for fans of...
Havoc : a novel
Bollen, Christopher
Paper Book
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist A New York Times' "Best Thriller of the Year" In the vein of The Bad Seed comes a twisty, atmospheric psychological suspense about a meddlesome elderly guest at a decadent luxury hotel who believes she has left her problematic past...
Year of wonders : a novel of the plague
Brooks, Geraldine.
Paper Book
"Plague stories remind us that we cannot manage without community . . . Year of Wonders is a testament to that very notion." - The Washington Post An unforgettable tale, set in 17th century England, of a village that quarantines itself to...
World War Z : an oral history of the zombie war
Brooks, Max
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Prepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies."--Entertainment Weekly   We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by...
Has anyone seen my toes? : a novel
Buckley, Christopher
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking and Make Russia Great Again comes a comic tour de force, the story of one man's spiraling journey through lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal...
The girl with all the gifts
Carey, Mike
Other
In the ruins of civilization, a young girl's kindness and capacity for love will either save humanity -- or wipe it out in this USA Today bestselling thriller Joss Whedon calls "heartfelt, remorseless, and painfully human." Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls...
The furies : two Charlie Parker novels
Connolly, John
Paper Book
Chaos and murder arrive in Charlie Parker's hometown of Portland, Maine, with two connected crimes in the latest novel in #1 nationally bestselling author John Connolly's "flawless and highly suspenseful" (PopSugar) series. From "a master of the macabre" (RT Book...
Pandemic
Cook, Robin
Paper Book
New York Times-bestselling author Robin Cook takes on the cutting-edge world of gene-modification in this pulse-pounding new medical thriller. When an unidentified, seemingly healthy young woman collapses suddenly on the New York City subway and dies upon reaching the...
The Andromeda strain
Crichton, Michael
Paper Book
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into...
The passage : a novel
Cronin, Justin.
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * This thrilling novel kicks off what Stephen King calls "a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction." NOW A FOX TV SERIES! NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST HORROR...
Day : a novel
Cunningham, Michael
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTELLER * An "exquisite" (The Boston Globe) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life--and how we all must learn to live together and apart--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours "The only problem with...
My heart will find you
Deveraux, Jude
Paper Book
"When the world is brought to a standstill in the early days of a global pandemic, Etta Wilmont finds herself suddenly stranded in Kansas City. Desperate to secure a roof over her head, Etta crosses paths with Henry Logan, a lonely older man in need of a caretaker. As Etta and Henry settle into a...
Love in the time of cholera
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * "A love story of astonishing power" (Newsweek), the acclaimed modern literary classic by the beloved Nobel Prize-winning author. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry...
Feed
Grant, Mira.
Paper Book
Feed is an electrifying and critically acclaimed novel of a world a half-step from our own that the New York Times calls "Astonishing" -- a novel of zombies, geeks, politics, social media, and the virus that runs through them all -- from New York Times bestseller...
The dog stars
Heller, Peter
Paper Book
"Leave it to Peter Heller to imagine a postapocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation. His hero, Hig, flies a 1956 Cessna (his dog as copilot) around what was once Colorado, chasing all the same things we chase in these pre-annihilation days: love, friendship, the...
The fireman : a novel
Hill, Joe
Paper Book
#1 New York Times Bestseller From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to...
The stand : a novel
King, Stephen
Paper Book
#1 BESTSELLER * NOW A PARAMOUNT+ LIMITED SERIES * Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting--and eerily plausible--as when it was first published. One of The...
Severance
Ma, Ling
Paper Book
Maybe it's the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma's offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both...
Bird box
Malerman, Josh
Paper Book
"A book that demands to be read in a single sitting, and through the cracks between one's fingers. There has never been a horror story quite like this. Josh Malerman truly delivers." -- Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool Written with the narrative tension of...
Sea of Tranquility
Mandel, Emily St. John
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years...
Station eleven
Mandel, Emily St. John
Paper Book
An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly-acclaimed previous novels. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later,...
Scot Mist A Last Ditch mystery #4
McPherson, Catriona.
Paper Book
Despite efforts to create a safe environment to see out the pandemic, the residents of the Last Ditch Motel face more dangers than they imagined possible in this hilarious yet claustrophobic mystery. March 2020 and Operation Cocker is a go! The owners of the Last Ditch...
The summer of lost and found
Monroe, Mary Alice
Paper Book
A timely, tender, and compassionate tale of perseverance, love, and the bonds of family in the face of tremendous and sometimes painful upheaval in this latest novel in the New York Times bestselling Beach House series. The coming of spring usually means renewal, but for...
Blind spots
Mullen, Thomas
Paper Book
"The pace is fast, the body count significant, the loopholes minor. All this tech-enabled police procedural lacks is a Lennie Briscoe zinger at the beginning. Two guns--I mean thumbs--up." -Wall Street Journal A riveting crime novel with a speculative edge about the...
How high we go in the dark : a novel
Nagamatsu, Sequoia
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE * ROXANE GAY'S AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK * FINALIST FOR THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE "Moving and thought-provoking . . . offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits." --...
The last one : a novel
Oliva, Alexandra
Paper Book
Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva's fast-paced novel of suspense. She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.   It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve...
The body in the web
Page, Katherine Hall
Paper Book
The 26th book in the award-winning Faith Fairchild Mysteries series. Katherine Hall Page's beloved amateur detective gets wrapped up in a Zoom-bombing scandal that sends her community into a tailspin ... just as a dead body is discovered. Faith Fairchild joins the rest...
Wish you were here : a novel
Picoult, Jodi
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of Small Great Things and The Book of Two Ways comes "a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit" (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy...
Year one
Roberts, Nora
Paper Book
A #1 New York Times Bestselling AuthorChronicles of The One (Book 1)It began on New Year's Eve. The sickness came on suddenly and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. In weeks, over half of the world's population was decimated. In a world where every stranger could be a savage or a savior,...
The years of rice and salt
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Paper Book
With the incomparable vision and breathtaking detail that brought his now-classic Marstrilogy to vivid life, bestselling author KIM STANLEY ROBINSON boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly...
Blindness
Saramago, José.
Paper Book
A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. An International Bestseller  * "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--Boston Globe
Lock in
Scalzi, John
Paper Book
TheNew York Times bestseller,Lock In, is a blazingly inventive near-future thriller from the Hugo Award-winning John Scalzi. Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than...
Künstlers in paradise
Schine, Cathleen
Paper Book
There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America. ...
The book of M
Shepherd, Peng
Paper Book
Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW! NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Elle * Refinery29 * PopSugar * Verge Author of LA Times Prize finalist The Cartographers "The Book of M is devastating and inventive as Shepherd examines the...
Our country friends : a novel
Shteyngart, Gary
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good...
Lucy by the sea : a novel
Strout, Elizabeth
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge comes a "poised and moving" (Vogue) novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown--and the love, loss, despair...
Find me : a novel
Van den Berg, Laura
Paper Book
Long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings usFind Me, her highly anticipated debut novel--a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. ...
Annihilation
VanderMeer, Jeff
Paper Book
Eleven secret government expeditions and few have returned unscathed-the first book in VanderMeer's exciting new Southern Reach Trilogy and soon to be a major motion picture Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of...
The summer place : a novel
Weiner, Jennifer
Paper Book
When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. But the wheels are in motion. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date (just three months away!) and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah's mother Veronica, about having the...
Zone one : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under...
Dooms day book
Willis, Connie.
Paper Book
Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. "A tour de force."--The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.