pandemic

Ilze Hugo’s debut novel Down Days was written before the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe, so the eerie similarities between her fictional version of Cape Town, South Africa and the real world today seem prophetic. Readers are introduced to Sick City ( formerly known as Cape Town )  7 years after a pandemic has affected the entire world. The slang term for the virus is called “the joke”, named for it’s symptom of uncontrollable laughter, but the other symptoms are no joke — a fever followed by organ failure leads to death. Although there is no cure for the infected, a vaccine is administered

While the Doomsday Book is categorized as science fiction, it could easily be classified as historical fiction. Set in the near future, a time when pandemics have recently ravaged the world, Oxford instructors prepare to send a young historian, Kivrin, to fourteenth century England.

One of Kivrin’s instructors, Dunworthy, is convinced this mission is a mistake and tries his best to stop it. Kivrin is convinced she is thoroughly prepared to spend two weeks in a superstitious, unhygienic, fear and disease-ridden age.

Alternating between the twenty-first and fourteenth centuries, Willis

When you are a contestant on a reality TV show, how can you tell the difference between what is real and what is manufactured for the program? One woman faces this dilemma as real-world events collide with simulated ones.

The survival-type show begins with twelve contestants sent into the woods to face numerous challenges--singly and in groups, physical and mental. The contestant who outlasts the others wins a cash prize. It seems simple enough, nothing that hasn’t been seen on these types of shows before. Some participants are in it purely for the money; some are out for the adventure. None

This volume completes Atwood's trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and continued in The Year of the Flood. In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a man-made global pandemic, known by God's Gardeners, a new environmental religious sect, as the waterless flood. But as the trilogy's main characters have discovered, there are more survivors than they originally imagined, and they're not all friendly and supportive. In this installment, the main characters of the previous two novels have converged together with other human survivors and the Crakers (the new human

Confession: post-apocalyptic stories are not my favorite genre and can be really hit or miss with me. Despite the overall rave reviews, I've never read Cormac McCarthy's The Road because it sounds too grim and bleak for me. I watched the first season of The Walking Dead and gave up when I found it too depressing. (And I'm a fan of the Cure and Joy Division, so it's not like I only like things bright and cheerful.) Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, however, is very definitely not a miss.

Beautiful, heartfelt writing and strong, complex, sympathetic characters keep this story from