The Plague Year

''A virtuoso feat ... a book of panoramic breadth'' New York Times Book Review

''A devastating analysis ... Wright is a master of knitting together complex narratives'' The Observer

Just as Lawrence Wright''s The Looming Tower became the defining account of our century''s first devastating event, 9/11, so The Plague Year will become the defining account of the second.

The story starts with the initial moments of Covid''s appearance in Wuhan and ends with Joseph Biden''s inauguration in an America ravaged by well over 400,000 deaths - a mortality already some ten times worse than US combat deaths in the entire Vietnam War.

This is an anguished, furious memorial to a year in which all of America''s great strengths - its scientific knowledge, its great civic and intellectual institutions, its spirit of voluntarism and community - were brought low, not by a terrifying new illness alone, but by political incomp