Author of pandemic novel: Experts knew this would happen, at some point

Ready for more authors writing about pandemics past and pretend?

NPR has two of them today.

One is another novelist who’s cringing at the eerie timing of his post-apocalyptic novel’s release (which took place yesterday).

The final draft of The End of October was submitted to its publisher last summer, but as author Lawrence Wright told Mary Louise Kelly, health experts had told him that an out-of-control virus would, at some point, dramatically affect the entire world. 

So the release was coincidental, but Wright certainly meant, from the start, to issue a warning cry through his tale of a virus that begins on one continent, devastates it, and keeps moving across oceans.

You can read highlights from his interview or the complete transcript on NPR's website, or listen to the conversation below.

And the bravest of heart are invited to also listen to Steve Inskeep's conversation with Frank Snowden, whose Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present looks back at other pandemics throughout history. 

Snowden is a professor of history and the history of medicine at Yale University.