"Moneyball" and "The Big Short" author is writing about COVID

Author Michael Lewis has shown a knack for making complex systems comprehensible — entertaining, even — to laypeople.

Moneyball and The Big Short even became movies.

But after those came 2018’s The Fifth Risk, which introduced Lewis to sources at government agencies that would be responsible for handling a previously unimaginable crisis.

Such possible crises? Cyberattacks on the electrical grid … or the wide spread of a deadly airborne virus.

Gulp.

Those sources are back in Lewis’s next work, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, which will come out May 4.

The New York Times reports that the book will follow three characters — a biochemist, a public health worker, and a federal government employee who worked in the White House — as they realize the response to the emerging COVID-19 outbreak is inadequate.

Lewis has declined to identify those sources at this time, since they’re still hard at work in the pandemic response — he said he didn’t want to interfere with their efforts.

You can read more about The Premonition: A Pandemic Story and other nonfiction takes on the COVID outbreak in the New York Times.

Related posts 

• Michael Rosen will publish a book about his battle with COVID-19 

• How COVID-19 might affect -- or has affected -- novels' plots