Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Spillover

the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

A gripping, timely book about the transmission of deadly viruses from animal to human populations, and how we can fight the current Covid-19 pandemic

A frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story

It may have been eight years since David Quammen's Spillover was first published, but its prescience is spookily topical this plague year

Travelling deep into the rainforest with the scientists hoping to identify the next pandemic pathogen, Quammen's book is plotted like a detective thriller

Quammen’s book is compelling and shows that there are many candidates out there vying to be the next pandemic

Quammen has a wide range of knowledge, an agile pen, and a generous heart

A tremendous book...this gives you all you need to know and all you should know. Quammen’s research and the analysis make sensationalism unnecessary

Mr Quammen is not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period...that he hasn’t won a non-fiction National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize is an embarrassment... Quammen is a patient explainer and a winning observer, he has a novelistic flair for describing his fellow humans... Quammen, combining physical and intellectual adventure, wraps his canny explorations into powerful moral witness

One of that rare breed of science journalists who blend exploration with a talent for synthesis and storytelling... This is a timely, serious and impressive work that marks the maturation of a field of microbiology

Terrific…the stories of the victims and the scientists are told in astonishing detail

He [Quammen] ranges with ease over decades and continents, drawing upon years of interviews and field trips with scientists...[he] is a lively writer and a good detective, tracing diseases from their first appearance back to their origins—in some cases, still unsettled... Quammen does not shy away from the lurid question of the “next big one” that will be on readers’ minds from the start

David Quammen is a recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of several acclaimed natural history titles. His book, The Song of the Dodo, won the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1996.

Read this gripping, timely book about the transmission of deadly viruses from animal to human populations, and how we can fight the current Covid-19 pandemic. 
 
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD ON CORONAVIRUS 
 
As globalization spreads and as we destroy the ancient ecosystems, we encounter strange and dangerous infections that originate in animals but that can be transmitted to humans. Diseases that were contained are being set free and the results are potentially catastrophic. 
 
In a journey that takes him from southern China to the Congo, from Bangladesh to Australia, David Quammen tracks these infections to their source, and asks what we can do to prevent some new pandemic spreading across the face of the earth. 
 
As we continue to feel the global impact of Covid-19, discover the book that predicted this viral disaster and the science that could stop the next one in its tracks. 
 
'A tremendous book...this gives you all you need to know and all you should know' Sunday Times 
 
'Chilling... [A] brilliant, devastating book' Daily Mail 
 
'A frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story' Walter Isaacson

How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest

The Chimp and the River

In this 'frightening and fascinating masterpiece' (Walter Isaacson), David Quammen explores the true origins of HIV/AIDS.

The real story of AIDS - how it originated with a virus in a chimpanzee, jumped to one human and infected more than 60 million people - is very different from what most of us think we know. 
 
Recent research has revealed dark surprises and yielded a radically new scenario of how AIDS began and spread. Excerpted and adapted from Spillover, with a new introduction by the author, Quammen's hair-raising investigation tracks the virus from chimp population s in the jungles off the southeastern Cameroon to laboratories across the globe, as he unravels the mysteries of when, where and how such a consequential 'spillover' can happen. 
 
An audacious search for answers amid more than a century of data, The Chimp and the River tells the haunting tale of one of the most devastating pandemics of our time.

The Natural and Human History

Ebola

EBOLA: unravelling the the mystery of one of the world's most deadly diseases

A nimble job...deeply unsettling but also sober minded...a standout in the floodlet of Ebola books

David Quammen is an author and journalist who travels widely to some of the remotest corners of the earth. He writes for a broad range of publications such as Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and is a Contributing Writer at National Geographic. His journalism has won him three National Magazine Awards, and he is the recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 
 
Quammen is the author of several acclaimed science and natural history titles, as well as a number of novels. His most recent book, Spillover, from which this book is largely extracted, is an exploration into how some of the world’s most deadly viruses crossed over from non-human animals into humans. Spillover won the Science and Society Book Prize, from the National Association of Science Writers in the United States, and the Society of Biology Book Award in the United Kingdom.

In 1976 a deadly virus emerged from the Congo forest. As swiftly as it came, it disappeared, leaving no trace. 
 
Over the four decades since, Ebola has emerged sporadically, each time to devastating effect. It can kill up to 90% of its victims. In between these outbreaks, it is untraceable, hiding deep in the jungle. The search is on to find Ebola’s elusive host animal. And until we find it, Ebola will continue to strike. 
 
Acclaimed science writer and explorer David Quammen first came near the virus whilst travelling in the jungles of Gabon, accompanied by local men whose village had been devastated by a recent outbreak. Here he tells the story of Ebola, its past, present and its unknowable future.

The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

Monster Of God

A provocative and richly detailed exploration of the critical relationship between humans and the great predators of the animal kingdom by the award winning author of The Song of Dodo.

Erudite, witty, and utterly fascinating, David Quammen's exegesis of the life and habits of four parlous predators - creatures that can and do consume humans - sets a new standard in nature writing.Here we have biology, history, sociology, politics and behaviourism combined in as full and rich a portrait of these animals and their environment as had ever been produced

T. C. Boyle, author of THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE

David Quammen is a recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of five acclaimed natural history titles. His book, The Song of the Dodo, won the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1996. He lives in Montana.

For millennia, nature's biggest and fiercest predators have tormented mankind. The knowledge and fear of the existence of these ferocious man-eaters is forever in the back of our minds, looming in our worst nightmares. Millions of humans have suffered attacks by predators on land and at sea. Yet animals have always shared the landscape with humans. Since the dawn of time our ecosystems have been linked and humans have co-existed with flesh-eating beasts as members of the same food chain. Now, of course, as humans spread and despoil the planet, these fearsome predators may only survive on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the nature of our own existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above - so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem. 
 
David Quammen's enthralling new book covers the four corners of the globe as he explores the fate of lions in India's Gir forest, saltwater crocodiles in Northern Australia, brown bears in the mountains of Romania, and Siberian tigers. Tracking these great and terrible beasts through the toughest terrain in the world, Quammen is equally intrigued by the traditional relationship between the great predators and the people who live among them, and weaves into his story the fears and myths that have haunted humankind for 3000 years.

Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

The Song Of The Dodo

This is a stunning book with graceful reverberations' Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge

Not only is this book compulsively readable - a masterpiece - it is maybe the masterpiece of science journalism

A moving book... Quammen is a good writer who has taken the time to master an important subject and do it justice

Not since Gerald Durrell's books 30 years ago have I encountered such writing about the natural world. The witty, pithy, modest prose and the clever interweaving of science and storytelling are of a quality unrivalled in th field

Impressive and deeply moving...blends first-rate science journalism with superb travel and nature writing

David Quammen is a brilliant young star of nature writing... His book is an important example of the genre, written in an enchanting style. His knowledge, based on years of research and adventure around the world, is truly impressive

Edward O. Wilson, author of 'The Diversity of Life'

David Quammen is a recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of five acclaimed natural history titles. His most recent book, The Song of the Dodo, won the BP Natural World Book Prize in 1996. He lives in Montana.

Why have island ecosystems always suffered such high rates of extinction? In our age, with all the world's landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, now being carved into island-like fragments by human activity, the implications of this question are more urgent than ever. Over the past eight years, David Quammen has followed the threads of island biogeography on a globe-encircling journey of discovery.

David Quammen

A supernova in among science journalists

An expert eye on Covid's past and present [and] a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers

[A] tour de force...A luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time - and the unprecedented international response to it.

As close to authoritative history - from the virus's origins to vaccines and variants - as we have, told through scientists involved, and the signature ease of Quammen's prose. It reads like a real-time thriller.

Will likely prove to be a classic in the history of science ... a masterpiece

Stanley Prusiner, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

[An] engrossing, at times breathless, scientific narrative of the COVID-19

A frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story

Fascinating and terrifying, Spillover is a real-life thriller with an outcome that affects us all

A tremendous book... this gives you all you need to know and should know. Quammen's research and analysis makes sensationalism unnecessary

Chilling... [A] brilliant, devastating book

Travelling deep into the rainforest with the scientists hoping to identify the next pandemic pathogen, Quammen's book is plotted like a detective thriller

David Quammen might be my favourite living science writer: amiable, erudite, understated, incredibly funny, profoundly humane

Come for the compelling interviews with key scientists, including Anthony Fauci; stay for the deep dive into the wild and unpredictable world of viruses

The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

'A luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time' New York Times 
 
From the bestselling author of Spillover, the book that predicted the pandemic, this is the story of Covid-19 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists tasked with fighting it. 
 
David Quammen draws on countless interviews with experts, including leading virologists, to take us inside the global race to understand SARS-CoV-2, it's ever-changing nature and capacity to kill. In doing so, he explains how new viruses emerge when we disrupt ecosystems and suggests why the coronavirus may be here to stay. 
 
By peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists leading the chase, Breathless uncovers the warnings from infectious diseases experts that went unheeded; and which clues are the most compelling in the hunt for the virus' origin. 
 
'A classic...a masterpiece' Stanley Prusiner, Nobel Prize Winner 
 
'A viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers' Observer 
 
'As close to authoritative history as we have... It reads like a real-time thriller' Chicago Tribune

David Quammen

Praise for Breathless

A supernova in among science journalists

An expert eye on Covid's past and present [and] a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers

[A] tour de force...A luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time - and the unprecedented international response to it.

A supernova in among science journalists

An expert eye on Covid's past and present [and] a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers

[A] tour de force...A luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time - and the unprecedented international response to it.

A supernova in among science journalists

An expert eye on Covid's past and present [and] a viral howdunnit that is pacy and unafraid to educate readers

[A] tour de force...A luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time - and the unprecedented international response to it.

Books by David Quammen

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter