Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright whose best-selling novel The End of the October all but predicted our current pandemic, brings his momentous account of COVID-19: its origins, its repercussions, and the fight to contain it.

Wright takes us inside the CDC, where the first round of faulty test kits cost America precious time; inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with great skepticism; into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from Little Africa, South Carolina; into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs; and even inside the human body, diving deep into the science of just how the virus and vaccines function, with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaxxer movement.

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.