If you want to understand how people behave when a disease shuts down a city, five books do it better than almost anything else: Albert Camus’s The Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, José Saramago’s Blindness, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. They span almost seven centuries, from the Black Death in Florence to a 1940s Algerian port, and between them they cover fear, denial, quarantine, rumour, courage, selfishness and the stubborn survival of love.
None of them is a medical manual, and none should be read as one. What they offer is perspective. When the COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020, readers turned to these titles in large numbers; Camus’s novel in particular became a bestseller again, and its publishers struggled to keep it in stock. Below is what each book is about, why it has lasted, and which one to pick depending on what you are in the mood for.
1. The Plague by Albert Camus (1947)
Camus sets his novel in Oran, a French-ruled port on the Algerian coast, sometime in the 1940s. It opens quietly: rats start dying in stairwells and gutters, and at first almost nobody pays attention. Then the concierge of the narrator’s building falls ill with a fever and dies. The narrator, a local physician named Bernard Rieux, and a colleague recognise the signs of plague, while officials and other doctors resist using the word. Eventually the gates close, an epidemic is declared, and the city is cut off from the world.
The power of the book lies in its small cast of very different people. Jean Tarrou, a visitor, organises volunteer health teams. Raymond Rambert, a journalist stranded far from the woman he loves, schemes to escape and then decides to stay. Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, first preaches that the disease is a punishment and later faces a harder test of his faith. Joseph Grand, a modest clerk, keeps working. Cottard, who has reasons to fear the law, thrives on smuggling during the lockdown.
Camus drew on Oran’s real history; a cholera epidemic killed a large share of the city’s population in 1849, and plague had struck it centuries earlier. Many readers also see the story as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France and of the choice between resistance and collaboration. Its message is unsentimental: decency often looks like doing your job, carefully, day after day.
Read it if you want a calm, morally serious novel about ordinary people deciding how to act when they cannot control events.
2. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (c. 1348–1353)
The Black Death reached Florence in 1348, and Boccaccio almost certainly lived through it. His book begins with a grim description of the city in the grip of the disease (scholars note that parts of it borrow from an older account by the eighth-century historian Paul the Deacon). Then the mood changes. Ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, leave the city for a quiet villa in the hills near Fiesole.
To pass the time, each of them tells one story a day, with a different member of the group acting as “king” or “queen” and choosing the day’s theme. Over ten days that makes 100 tales: comic, bawdy, tragic, clever and occasionally cruel. The title comes from Greek and means roughly “ten days’ work”. The book has been nicknamed l’Umana commedia, the Human Comedy, a playful echo of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it carries the subtitle Prencipe Galeotto, after a go-between figure from the Arthurian romances.
Its influence is enormous. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales borrows its storytelling frame and reworks some of its plots, Shakespeare took the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well from one tale, and Keats based his poem “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” on another.
Read it if you want a reminder that storytelling, friendship and laughter are also ways of getting through a crisis. You can dip into a few tales at a time.
3. Blindness by José Saramago (1995)
Saramago’s novel, first published in Portuguese as Ensaio sobre a cegueira, imagines an epidemic that does not kill but blinds. A driver waiting at a traffic light suddenly sees nothing but a milky white glare. The condition spreads, and the authorities respond by herding the newly blind into an abandoned asylum under armed guard. Inside, order collapses fast: food is hoarded, a gang seizes control, and the weak are exploited.
One person secretly keeps her sight: the doctor’s wife, who pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband. She becomes the eyes and the conscience of a small group that eventually escapes into a city where the whole society has gone blind. Nobody in the book has a name; characters are called “the doctor”, “the girl with dark glasses” or “the car thief”, which makes the story feel like a fable about any city at all.
It is a hard read in places, with scenes of violence and degradation, and Saramago’s long sentences and sparse punctuation take a few pages to get used to. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, this book was among the works the committee had in mind. A sequel, Seeing, followed in 2004, and Fernando Meirelles directed a film version in 2008.
Read it if you want to think about how quickly institutions fail and what holding on to your humanity actually costs.
4. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1722)
This book appeared in March 1722 under the initials “H. F.” and presents itself as the memoir of a saddler who stayed in London during the Great Plague of 1665, the city’s last major plague epidemic. Defoe himself was only about five years old that year, so the narrator cannot be him. Scholars think the account draws on the experiences, and possibly the papers, of his uncle Henry Foe, a saddler who lived in Whitechapel in East London.
For decades readers took it as a genuine eyewitness record. Today it is usually described as a historical novel, though some critics still argue about how much of it is reportage. What makes it gripping is the detail: named streets and parishes, weekly tables of burials, shut-up houses with red crosses on the doors, quack remedies, and the constant question of whether to flee or stay.
One small correction to a common summary: the plague year described is 1665, not 1655, and the book was written more than half a century after the events, at a time when plague in Marseille had revived fear of the disease across Europe.
Read it if you like history told through a single, anxious, observant voice. It reads surprisingly like a modern diary of a lockdown.
5. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
Published in Spanish as El amor en los tiempos del cólera and translated into English by Edith Grossman in 1988, this is the gentlest book on the list. As teenagers in a Caribbean port city, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall in love through letters. Her father forces them apart, and she marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a respected physician who dedicates himself to modern medicine and to stamping out cholera in the city.
Florentino waits for more than half a century. Only after Urbino dies in an accident does he declare himself again, and the novel ends with the two of them, now old, on a riverboat trip that they do not want to end. Cholera is mostly background, but it shapes the book’s central idea. In Spanish, cólera means both the disease and rage or passion, and García Márquez plays with the overlap: love here has symptoms, fevers and relapses, much like an illness. Mike Newell directed a film adaptation in 2007, shot in Cartagena, Colombia.
Read it if you need something warm and funny that still takes life, ageing and mortality seriously.
Which one should you start with?
- For a short, focused read: The Plague. It is compact and its themes are easy to carry into everyday life.
- For history: A Journal of the Plague Year, ideally alongside a modern account of the 1665 epidemic so you can compare the narrator’s impressions with the record.
- For comfort: Love in the Time of Cholera or a handful of tales from The Decameron.
- For a challenge: Blindness, which is the most disturbing of the five and the most likely to stay with you.
A practical tip: translations matter. For The Decameron and The Plague there are several English versions with very different tones, so it is worth reading a sample page of two editions before you commit. If you want to go further, other classics on the same theme include Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) and Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), set during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
What these books get right about epidemics
Read together, the five books keep returning to the same patterns. Authorities hesitate to name the danger. Rumours spread faster than facts. Some people profit, some hide, and some quietly volunteer. Isolation sharpens both cruelty and kindness. None of the authors claims that suffering makes people better; what they show is that it reveals what was already there.
They also share a certain hope. Rieux keeps treating patients, Boccaccio’s young storytellers create a small, civil world of their own, the doctor’s wife refuses to abandon her group, Defoe’s saddler keeps counting and recording, and Florentino keeps loving. That is the real reason to read these books in hard times: not to predict what happens next, but to remember the range of choices people have always had.
Sources: Wikipedia: The Plague (novel); Wikipedia: The Decameron; Wikipedia: Blindness (novel); Wikipedia: A Journal of the Plague Year; Wikipedia: Love in the Time of Cholera.
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