New York TimesEditors’ Choice
One ofPeople’s15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer
The Next Big Idea Club‘s July 2026 Must-Read Books
One of theNew York TimesNonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
Sunset Magazine’s15 New Books You Don’t Want to Miss

From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestsellingNuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.

A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.

The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.

Following the gripping narrative style that launchedNuclear Warto theNew York Timesbestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.

This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.