"A dramatic and highly interesting story--one that brings to life the complexities of plague and of piety."--Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

‘Lord have mercy upon us’. If these words were painted on your door, it could only mean one thing—you were one of the infected. In the years 1665 and 1666, the bubonic plague ravaged London. Bodies piled up on the streets, families quarantined themselves indoors. 100,000 people would perish, a quarter of the city’s population. In "A Journal of the Plague Year", Daniel Defoe offer a fictionalised account of the pandemic, seen through the eyes of a God-fearing, upper-class Londoner. Gruesome and vivid in its details, it makes for a terrifyingly relevant read for modern audiences. English writer Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) led an extraordinary life. As a child, he survived both the Great Fire of London and a major outbreak of the bubonic plague. As an adult, he enjoyed careers as a merchant, political satirist, rebel soldier and even a spy. Defoe was in his fifties before he finally turned his hand to fiction. "Robinson Crusoe", his first novel, was an instant bestseller. The story of a shipwrecked sailor, its style and structure made it a landmark text in the history of English literature. His other notable works include "Moll Flanders", "A Journal of the Plague Year" and "Captain Singleton".

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

"A Journal of the Plague Year" is a brilliant historical novel by Daniel Defoe written with journalistic precision. It is one man's chronicles of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague struck the city of London.

This novel is an account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague or the bubonic plague struck the city of London. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings. Presented as an eyewitness account of the events at the time, it was written in the years just prior to the book's first publication in March 1722. Defoe was only five years old in 1665, and the book itself was published under the initials H. F. and is probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe.In the book, Defoe goes to great pains to achieve an effect of verisimilitude, identifying specific neighborhoods, streets, and even houses in which events took place. Additionally, it provides tables of casualty figures and discusses the credibility of various accounts and anecdotes received by the narrator. The novel is often compared to the actual, contemporary accounts of the plague in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Defoe's account, which appears to include much research, is far more systematic and detailed than Pepys's first-person account. Whether the Journal can properly be regarded as a novel has been disputed.

A Journal of the Plague Year is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in March 1722. This novel is an account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the Great Plague or the bubonic plague struck the city of London. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings.