The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

Glasgow, 2025. Dr Amanda Maclean is called to treat a patient with flu-like symptoms. Within three hours he is dead. This is how it begins.

The unknown virus sweeps through the hospital with deadly speed.

The victims are all men.

Dr Maclean raises the alarm. But by the time the authorities listen to her, the virus has spread to every corner of the world. Threatening families. Governments. Countries.

Can they find a cure before it’s too late? Can they stop THE END OF MEN?

---

The author assures us that this book was conceived of and written in 2018, when the idea of a pandemic affected the whole world was laughable. Nowadays, of course, it's not quite so far fetched. Still, at least ours doesn't have the death rate that the fictional Plague does.

I tore through this book in less than twenty four hours. It's a fascinating look at how the world might react to this kind of plague. (Quite late in the book, when a COBRA meeting are discussing allocating children to parents, I had the horrific thought that at least child abuse would probably go down.) The slight differences between countries are interesting, too, and someone more anthropologically minded than me would probably be able to read quite a lot into that.

I do have one tiny niggle, and I have to bear in mind that I'm reading a very early proof copy and this may not be an issue in the finished book; I found it hard to keep track of who everyone was. We're following a dozen or more people, who all have friends and support systems, across more than five years, and at least for me I didn't find the narration very different. Each section is headed with the character's first name, where they are and the time, in days, since the plague started, but I kept having to remind myself which person was which. Again, though, I'm reading a proof and there may be a dramatis personae or an index in the finished book.

Apart from that very minor niggle, I really enjoyed this. Christina obviously thought really carefully about the impact this plague would have on the world. I would have loved it to go on a little longer and see what effect the drastically reduced child population would have on the world, but that's not what this story was about.

I think even without current circumstances, this book would have made me feel creepy and like I should keep away from people; it's just that good. I'm really looking forward to seeing what else Christina writes. I think she's going to be one to watch.


The End of Men publishes on the 29th April 2021.