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Flu

Books about influenza

Fiction

• The First Horseman
  Author: Case, John
  Publisher: Fawcett $ 25 ISBN: 0449911020 Date: 1998
  With the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Genesis Code, John Case gave us a compelling, chillingly plausible novel of suspense. Now Case returns with a thriller that combines cutting-edge science, biblical scholarship, and political intrigue with a caatastrophic, all-too-real nightmare for the coming millennium. A crippled North Korean peasant staggers across miles of icy terrain to tell an astonishing tale of a village decimated by disease -- and how the military massacred everyone to contain it. The horrific story portends the possible resurgence of a deadly virus that killed more than fifty million people eighty years ago. Soon a covert scientific expedition is dispatched to extract the viral isolates from the lung tissues of miners who succumbed to that lethal strain of flu in 1918 -- and to create a vaccine. But a shocking discovery awaits the researchers. And when an investigative reporter delves into the increasingly disturbing events, he finds himself pursuing the most dangerous story of his life.... - Publisher Marketing.
• The Return of the Spanish Lady
  Author: Davis, Val
  Publisher: St Martins $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312262248 Date: 2001
  Nicolette Scott, an archaeologist and old plane expert, is asked to join a search for a Japanese plane downed in Alaska during WWII. The mission is being funded by a pharmaceutical company "in the interest of history". However, a much darker motive powers the search, one which Nick gradually becomes aware of. Knowing that the virus of the dreaded Spanish flu that killed millions around the world in 1918-9 will survive in corpses kept frozen, company executives hope to find the bodies of three First World War veterans who died of the flu while hunting for gold. Their plan is to callously unleash a similar epidemic and then ride in on a white horse with their antidote -- to enormous profit. Nick, horrified, determines to stop the plot even if she must lose her life in the process. - Publisher Marketing.
  
• Divining Women
  Author: Gibbons, Kaye
  Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399151605 Date: 2004
  It's fall of 1918 and, faced with a difficult pregnancy and even more difficult husband, Maureen Ross must find the strength to confront her tormentor, survive childbirth and, ultimately, find spiritual renewal.
  
• Wickett's Remedy
  Author: Goldberg, Myla
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385513240 Date: 2005
  Kirkus LJ
  The triumphant follow-up to the bestselling Bee Season, is a novel about the dream of progress--personal, scientific, commercial, and cultural--featuring a charming heroine whose desire for a better life comes up against the sweep of history.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction
  Updated 7.12.05
• The Sailmaker's Daughter
  Author: Johnson, Stephanie
  Publisher: St Martins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312306938 Date: 2003
  It is 1918 and Spanish Flu is epidemic in Suva, the capital of Fiji. Twelve year old Olive is sent with her brothers and grandmother to Taveuni to stay with her childless aunt and uncle on their sugar plantation to escape the disease as her mother lies dying of the flu in their family home. The months that follow hold magic and sorrow for Olive, as she uncovers well kept family secrets and grieves for her dying mother. - Publisher Marketing.
  
• The Stand
  Author: King, Stephen
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 50 ISBN: 0385199570 Date: 1990
  Stephen King's best book is now even better. When The Stand was first published in 1978, 150,000 words were cut from the manuscript. With this new edition, those words are restored, providing new characters, a greater depth of characterization, and a new, expanded ending.
  
• They Came Like Swallows
  Author: Maxwell, William
  Publisher: Modern Library $ 15.50 ISBN: 067960247X Date: 1997
  First published in 1937, They Came Like Swallows was William Maxwell's second novel. It tells of an ordinary American family overtaken by the devastating epidemic of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The book begins on the day before the armistice in a small midwestern town, and the events are seen from the perspective, in turn, of eight-year-old Peter Morison - called Bunny; of his older brother, Robert; and of their father. They are witnesses to a domestic tragedy that is written with beauty and a quite magnificent tenderness. - Publisher Marketing.
  
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels
  Author: Porter, Katherine Ann
  Publisher: Modern Library $ 18.95 ISBN: 0679603034 Date: 1998
  Texas-born in 1890, Katherine Anne Porter was a master of the short novel or long story, as she preferred to call her pieces, eschewing the term novella. Here are three short novels--"Noon Wine", "Old Mortality", and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"--considered among the most beautifully wrought narratives in American fiction.
  
• London
  Author: Rutherfurd, Edward
  Publisher: Crown $ 25.95 ISBN: 0517591812 Date: 1997
  The author of the bestsellers Sarum and Russka now brings readers his most compelling book yet--the story of the city of London over the course of two thousand years. Rutherfurd invents the destinies of seven very different family clans who create and recreate the city anew, from the Roman occupation of the provincial town they called Londinium in the third century to the world capital of today. (includes section on 1918 flu)
  

Nonfiction

• The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the 1918 Pandemic
  Author: Barry, John M.
  Publisher: Viking $ 29.95 ISBN: 0670894737 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist
  No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together.
  Updated 2.23.04
• Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It
  Author: Kolata, Gina Bari
  Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux ISBN: 0-374-15706-5 $ 25
  PW
  An acclaimed reporter for The New York Times unravels the mystery of the 1918 Great Flu Epidemic with the high drama of an exciting adventure story.