Lawrence Wright on His Pandemic Prescience

The novel virus first emerged in east Asia. By spring, a pandemic suffuses the globe. In America, businesses shut down, airports empty, misinformation abounds. The president, a divisive figure with a tanning bed in the White House, offers baseless reassurances, and appoints the dubiously pious vice-president to lead the pandemic response. This would be a decent summary of the past two months, if it wasn’t the plot to The End of October, a new novel by Lawrence Wright, which flies thrillingly, eerily close to reality – a global outbreak of a deadly pathogen with no known cure in the kinetic, flammable information torrent of the late 2010s.