“What are the best books about Viruses & Diseases?” We looked at 114 of the top Virus/Disease books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!
The top 20 titles, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Virus & Disease” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 75+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.
Happy Scrolling!
Lists It Appears On:
By the time Rock Hudson’s death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments. Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation’s welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.
Lists It Appears On:
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
Lists It Appears On:
What might be done to human beings by the “Other”–whether the “Other” be vampires, demons or creatures from outer space–is always in competition for absolute horror with what we do to ourselves. Stephen King has, in his time, played with both sources of the nightmarish and in Dreamcatcher, the first complete novel since his near-fatal accident, he gives us both.Four childhood friends, united by secrets, are caught in the quarantine zone when something crashes into the remote forests of Maine; and the question becomes who will avoid being eaten alive by alien fungi, torn from the inside by alien ferrets, possessed by alien minds or menaced by a psychotic military commander to whom ruthlessness has become a macho ego trip?The Earth is in peril as well, needless to say, but most of our attention is taken up with a few men caught on the edge, and where the most important thing in the world turns out to be the fact that four small boys saved a fifth from a beating.
Lists It Appears On:
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising, bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives—the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will get out, even if it kills them.
Lists It Appears On:
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth… but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville’s blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?
Lists It Appears On:
The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as “magical realism.”
Lists It Appears On:
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
Lists It Appears On:
Murder and mystery reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country. Dr. Marissa Blumenthal of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control investigates–and soon uncovers the medical world’s deadliest secret.
Lists It Appears On:
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
Lists It Appears On:
Unpurified drinking water. Improper use of antibiotics. Local warfare. Massive refugee migration. Changing social and environmental conditions around the world have fostered the spread of new and potentially devastating viruses and diseases—HIV, Lassa, Ebola, and others. Laurie Garrett takes you on a fifty-year journey through the world’s battles with microbes and examines the worldwide conditions that have culminated in recurrent outbreaks of newly discovered diseases, epidemics of diseases migrating to new areas, and mutated old diseases that are no longer curable. She argues that it is not too late to take action to prevent the further onslaught of viruses and microbes, and offers possible solutions for a healthier future.
Lists It Appears On:
A post-apocalyptic journey across three continents, The Fallen explores how far we would go to protect the ones we love. When a wave of energy from deep space passes over the Earth, human memory is erased and technology destroyed. With humanity reduced to a state of nature, Tim finds himself in Africa, separated from his wife by unimaginable distance. Meanwhile, two young scientists in America try to escape the chaos, seeking answers and safety. Will they find what they are looking for, or will they succumb to The Fallen? — ‘A modern science fiction adventure in the tradition of 28 Days Later, War of the Worlds and The Road.’
Lists It Appears On:
Slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. Now, she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?
Lists It Appears On:
When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his name. He’s surrounded by strangers—boys whose memories are also gone. Outside the towering stone walls that surround them is a limitless, ever-changing maze. It’s the only way out—and no one’s ever made it through alive. Then a girl arrives. The first girl ever. And the message she delivers is terrifying: Remember. Survive. Run.
Lists It Appears On:
In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her. Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death and ruin. These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned—and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights.
Lists It Appears On:
The White Plague, a marvelous and terrifyingly plausible blend of fiction and visionary theme, tells of one man who is pushed over the edge of sanity by the senseless murder of his family and who, reappearing several months later as the so-called Madman, unleashes a terrible plague upon the human race—one that zeros in, unerringly and fatally, on women.
Lists It Appears On:
For three decades, Dr. C. J. Peters was on the front lines of our biological battle against “hot” viruses around the world. In the course of that career, he learned countless lessons about our interspecies turf wars with infectious agents. Called in to contain an outbreak of deadly hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia, he confronted the despair of trying to save a colleague who accidentally infected himself with an errant scalpel. Working in Level 4 labs on the Machupo and Ebola viruses, he saw time and again why expensive high-tech biohazard containment equipment is only as safe as the people who use it.
Lists It Appears On:
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?” Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.
Lists It Appears On:
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to collect organisms and dust for study. One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town’s inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.
Lists It Appears On:
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides — or are chosen.
Lists It Appears On:
The bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic “hot” virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their “crashes” into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction. From the Paperback edition.
| # | Books | Authors | Lists |
| 21 | 8th Round | T.C. O’Reilly | Goodreads |
| 22 | A Death-Struck Year | Makiia Lucier | Goodreads |
| 23 | A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe | Goodreads |
| 24 | All Fools’ Day | Edmund Cooper | Goodreads |
| 25 | Autumn (Autumn, #1) | David Moody | Goodreads |
| 26 | Beat | Jared Garrett | Goodreads |
| 27 | Beating Back the Devil | Suggest Me Some | |
| 28 | Biohazard | Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman | Paste Magazine |
| 29 | Bloodline (Forgotten Origins Trilogy #1) | Tara Ellis | Goodreads |
| 30 | Dead Chaos (Dead Chaos #1) | April Brookshire | Goodreads |
| 31 | Deadly Feasts | Richard Rhodes | Paste Magazine |
| 32 | Deadly Outbreaks: How Medical Detectives Save Lives Threatened by Killer Pandemics, Exotic Viruses, and Drug-Resistant Parasites | Suggest Me Some | |
| 33 | Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead. | Chris Pauls | Goodreads |
| 34 | Dining Out with the Ice Giants (Dining Out Around The Solar System, #2) | Clare O’Beara | Goodreads |
| 35 | Do No Harm (Joseph #1) | Danielle Singleton | Goodreads |
| 36 | Earth Abides | George R. Stewart | Goodreads |
| 37 | Ebola | Suggest Me Some | |
| 38 | Elixir (Red Plague, #1) | Anna Abner | Goodreads |
| 39 | Executive Orders (Jack Ryan Universe, #9) | Tom Clancy | Goodreads |
| 40 | Fever | Mary Beth Keane | Goodreads |
| 41 | Fever 1793 | Laurie Halse Anderson | Goodreads |
| 42 | God Made Us Monsters | William Neary | Goodreads |
| 43 | Greybeard | Brian W. Aldiss | Goodreads |
| 44 | H1NZ (H1NZ series) | Stephen J. Sweeney | Goodreads |
| 45 | In a Perfect World | Laura Kasischke | Goodreads |
| 46 | In The Devil’s Own Words | Elizabeth Wixley | Goodreads |
| 47 | Infected (Click Your Poison, #1) | James Schannep | Goodreads |
| 48 | Kill Ratio | Bryan Cassiday | Goodreads |
| 49 | Killer Germs | Suggest Me Some | |
| 50 | Kronk | Edmund Cooper | Goodreads |
| 51 | Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory | Michael Christopher Carroll | Goodreads |
| 52 | Love in the Ruins | Walker Percy | Goodreads |
| 53 | Music City Macabre (The Low Lying Lands #1) | Bob Williams | Goodreads |
| 54 | Nemesis | Philip Roth | Goodreads |
| 55 | Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic | Hillary Johnson | Goodreads |
| 56 | Paraplegic Zombie Slayer (Lost DMB Files, #35) | David Mark Brown | Goodreads |
| 57 | Peeps (Peeps, #1) | Scott Westerfeld | Goodreads |
| 58 | Pestilence | Brian L. Porter | Goodreads |
| 59 | Plague Year (Plague, #1) | Jeff Carlson | Goodreads |
| 60 | Reflections | Elizabeth Wixley | Goodreads |
| 61 | Roman Fever and Other Stories | Edith Wharton | Goodreads |
| 62 | Sanctuary in Steel | Bryan Cassiday | Goodreads |
| 63 | Seizure (Virals, #2) | Kathy Reichs | Goodreads |
| 64 | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | Suggest Me Some | |
| 65 | Surge (Wheezers #1) | Katelin LaMontagne | Goodreads |
| 66 | The Alchemist’s Cat (The Deptford Histories, #1) | Robin Jarvis | Goodreads |
| 67 | The Biology of Doom | Ed Regis | Paste Magazine |
| 68 | The Cobra Event | Richard Preston | Goodreads |
| 69 | The Complex (Linx, # 1) | Cathy E. Zaragoza | Goodreads |
| 70 | The Dead (The Enemy #2) | Charlie Higson | Goodreads |
| 71 | The Death Cure (The Maze Runner, #3) | James Dashner | Goodreads |
| 72 | The Death Row Complex (Katrina Stone #2) | Kristen Elise | Goodreads |
| 73 | The Demon in the Freezer | Richard Preston | Paste Magazine |
| 74 | The Devil’s Alphabet | Softonic | |
| 75 | The Dog Stars | Peter Heller | Goodreads |
| 76 | The Enemy (The Enemy, #1) | Charlie Higson | Goodreads |
| 77 | The Fault in Our Stars | John Green | Goodreads |
| 78 | The Fear (The Enemy #3) | Charlie Higson | Goodreads |
| 79 | The Fireman | Joe Hill | Goodreads |
| 80 | The Fourth Generation | Chris von Halle | Goodreads |
| 81 | The Gas | Charles Platt | Goodreads |
| 82 | The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World | Suggest Me Some | |
| 83 | The Girl With All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts, #1) | M.R. Carey | Goodreads |
| 84 | The Great Influenza | John M. Barry | Tor |
| 85 | The Hatching | Ezekiel Boone | Goodreads |
| 86 | The Kill Order (The Maze Runner, #0.5) | James Dashner | Goodreads |
| 87 | The Last One | Alexandra Oliva | Goodreads |
| 88 | The Nirvana Plague | Gary Glass | Goodreads |
| 89 | The Passage (The Passage, #1) | Justin Cronin | Goodreads |
| 90 | The Plague | Albert Camus | Goodreads |
| 91 | The Problem with Crazy (Crazy In Love, #1) | Lauren K. McKellar | Goodreads |
| 92 | The Sacrifice (The Enemy #4) | Charlie Higson | Goodreads |
| 93 | The Scarlet Plague | Jack London | Goodreads |
| 94 | The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner, #2) | James Dashner | Goodreads |
| 95 | The Thanatos Syndrome | Walker Percy | Goodreads |
| 96 | The Things That Keep Us Here | Carla Buckley | Goodreads |
| 97 | The Turn: The Hollows Begins with Death (The Hollows #0.1) | Kim Harrison | Goodreads |
| 98 | The Two Princesses of Bamarre (The Two Princesses of Bamarre, #1) | Gail Carson Levine | Goodreads |
| 99 | The Undead: Book One, Overview | Michael Pugh | Goodreads |
| 100 | The Undead: Book Two, North America | Michael Pugh | Goodreads |
| 101 | The Vesuvius Isotope (Katrina Stone #1) | Kristen Elise | Goodreads |
| 102 | The Way We Fall (Fallen World, #1) | Megan Crewe | Goodreads |
| 103 | This is the Way the World Ends: An Oral History of the Zombie War | Keith Taylor | Goodreads |
| 104 | This Time of Dying | Reina James | Goodreads |
| 105 | Twitch and Die! (Lost DMB Files #26) | David Mark Brown | Goodreads |
| 106 | Under Dark Sky Law | Tamara Boyens | Goodreads |
| 107 | Virals (Virals, #1) | Kathy Reichs | Goodreads |
| 108 | Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1) | Isaac Marion | Goodreads |
| 109 | White Horse (White Horse, #1) | Alex Adams | Goodreads |
| 110 | Wither (The Chemical Garden, #1) | Lauren DeStefano | Goodreads |
| 111 | World Without End (Kingsbridge, #2) | Ken Follett | Goodreads |
| 112 | Year of Wonders | Geraldine Brooks | Goodreads |
| 113 | Zombie Maelstrom | Bryan Cassiday | Goodreads |
| 114 | Zombie Necropolis | Bryan Cassiday | Goodreads |
| Source | Article |
| Goodreads | Best Fiction Books About Diseases or Viruses |
| Paste Magazine | Seven Viral Books About Pathogens |
| Softonic | 16 Best fiction books about diseases or viruses 2018 |
| Suggest Me Some | 10 Nonfiction Books About Pandemics |
| Tor | Five Essential Books About Plagues and Pandemics |
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