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
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Oryx and Crake : a novel
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find...
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...
Year of wonders : a novel of the plague
Brooks, Geraldine
Paper Book
"When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a...
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...
The girl with all the gifts
Carey, Mike
Paper Book
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 Andromeda strain
Crichton, Michael
Paper Book
"This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis. As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable...
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...
Love in the time of cholera
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, this is a story about a woman and two men and their entwined lives. From the author of the legendary One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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
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...
Station eleven
Mandel, Emily St. John
Paper Book
This Anniversary Edition of Station Eleven, a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of the Twenty-First Century by the New York Times, celebrates ten years of this now iconic novel with a new color illustration and a guide to "The Mandelverse" A...
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 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 city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers...
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...
Annihilation
VanderMeer, Jeff.
Paper Book
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC NOW AVAILBLE IN A SPECIAL NEW TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or...
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...

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