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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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
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
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, the break-out science fiction debut. Anderson Lake is AgriGen's Calorie Man, sent to work undercover as a factory manager in Thailand while combing Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping...
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
"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.
Audiobook
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world,...
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
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 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
A mail-order bride A lonely rancher A portal to the past Their love refused to stay quiet, echoing across time... When the world is brought to a standstill in the early days of a global pandemic, Etta Wilmont finds...
Love in the time of cholera
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs-yet he reserves his heart for...
Feed
Grant, Mira.
Audiobook
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
Ebook
#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
Now a Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, Rosa Salazar and John Malkovich! Written with the narrative tension of The Road and the exquisite terror of classic Stephen King, Bird Box is a propulsive, edge-of-your-seat horror thriller, set in an apocalyptic near-future world-...
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
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...
Scot mist
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
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER (December 2017) A stunning new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts--Year One is an epic of hope and horror, chaos and magick, and a journey that will unite a desperate group of people to fight the...
The years of rice and salt
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Ebook
WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD * The bestselling author of the Mars trilogy boldly reimagines the past seven hundred years in this "exceptional and engrossing" (New York Post) saga, constructing a world vastly different from the one we know. . . "A thoughtful, magisterial alternate...
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. ...
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
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...
The summer place : a novel
Weiner, Jennifer
Paper Book
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTELLER From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of That Summer comes another heartfelt and unputdownable novel of family, secrets, and the ties that bind. When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter announces her...
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...
Doomsday 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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