Our Reading Theme for March is fiction featuring infectious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics. Wash your hands.
Saving the World: A Novel by Julia Alvarez
“Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family saga. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic… Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It's the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live ‘carriers’ of the vaccine. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y Gómez, director of La Casa de Expósitos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed-- with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage… This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo.” -Publisher’s summary
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
A “brilliant return to the nightmarish future first envisioned in Oryx and Crake... Contrary to expectations, the waterless flood, a biological disaster predicted by a fringe religious group, actually arrives. In its wake, the survivors must rely on their wits to get by, all the while reflecting on what went wrong.” -Library Journal review
The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by Jurg Federspiel
“For forty years she roamed New York like an angel of death.
A typhoid carrier - herself immune but lethal to her unsuspecting victims - Mary Mallon bore her disease over the thresholds and into the kitchens of the elite homes, hotels and hospitals of nineteenth century New York. Always moving on before the authorities could catch up with her, she bought death to untold thousands. Yet her only crime was her refusal to give up her sole - and deadly- source of pleasure: cooking. From the [true story of] Typhoid Mary, JF Federspiel has created this bizarre and haunting novel.” -Publisher’s summary
Life Support by Tess Gerritsen
“The overnight ER rotation at Springer Hospital suits Dr. Toby Harper just fine -- until its calm is shattered by a man Toby admits one quiet night. Delirious and in critical condition from a possible viral infection of the brain, he barely responds to treatment...and then he disappears without a trace. But before Toby can find her missing patient, a second case occurs, revealing a chilling twist: evidence of an infection that can only be spread through direct tissue exchange. Soon Toby's on a trail that winds from a pregnant sixteen-year-old prostitute to an unexpected tragedy in her own home. Only then does she discover the unthinkable: an evil, deadly design to the frightening epidemic.” -Publisher’s summary
The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono
“This is a novel of adventure, a ‘roman courtois,’ that tells the story of Angelo, a nobleman who has been forced to leave Italy because of a duel, and is returning to his homeland by way of Provence. But that region is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, travelers are being imprisoned behind barricades, and exposure to the disease is almost certain. Angelo's escapades, adventures, and heroic self-sacrifice in this hot, hallucinatory landscape, among corpses, criminals and rioting townspeople, share this epic tale.” -Publisher’s summary
Son of the Circus by John Irving
“An Indian-Canadian doctor returns to Bombay to seek a cure for a disease which afflicts circus dwarfs and is caught up in a serial killing of prostitutes. The action is interspersed with commentary on the lot of social misfits: prostitutes, dwarfs, himself--the doctor regarding himself a foreigner in both India and Canada.” -Publisher’s summary
The Stand by Stephen King
“A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, in a desert world, experience dreams of good and evil in confrontation and, through their choices, move toward an actual confrontation.” -Publisher’s summary
As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner
This novel “follows the story of the Bright family as they move to Philadelphia in 1918 to assume their inherited place within the family funeral business. The relocation is meant to ease the loss of Henry, their youngest member, but just as they start to navigate their grief, the Spanish flu hits the city, devastating them anew… Meissner's prose maintains a balanced tone of sorrow throughout this novel. Fans of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and the television show Six Feet Under will enjoy.” -Library Journal review
Natural Causes by Michael Palmer
“Dr. Sarah Baldwin, an intern in a hospital in Boston, likes to treat her patients with vitamin supplements. When one patient dies and others fall sick, the question arises: Is it the vitamins or is someone trying to frame her?” -Publisher’s summary
Blindness by José Saramago
“Reminiscent of Albert Camus's The Plague, this provocative allegorical novel by noted Portuguese writer Saramago deals with a contagious ‘white’ blindness that spreads very quickly in a large city. Among a small group of people grappling with the horror and chaos, one woman has been spared; she is the reader's eyewitness. In an environment ripe with philosophical implications, only the most fundamental of human needs endures.” -Library Journal review
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