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With stakes so high, its easy to see why novelists find outbreaks of disease so compelling.
Here are 20 great fictional takes, ranging from the historical to the futuristic.
Plagues are like imponderable dangers that surprise people, Gabriel Garcia Marquez told the New YorkTimesin 1988.
They seem to have a quality of destiny.
In this world, cancer has been cured but life spans have been reduced as an unexpected consequence.
Its a novel in which concepts of sickness, health, and mortality itself are turned on their heads.
Its also reflective of Rymans approach to fiction.
In a 2006 interview, he said, Stories make us sick.
Neuroses and psychoses are just stories we tell ourselves and believe.
Griffiths award-winning novel uses a futuristic epidemic to address questions of gender and society.
The novels narrator runs a beauty salon, which becomes a hospice for those afflicted.
In the Nobel Prizewinning authorsBlindness, a growing number of people within a city find themselves unable to see.
The governments response is heavy-handed and authoritarian.
Adrians fiction blends his own career in medicine alongside the mythological and fantastical.
Mandels story is an ultimately hopeful one, focusing on the ways art endures.
Ma describes a fictional epidemic that taps into anxieties about both pandemics and nostalgia.
Its a resonant metaphor for the way the past can burden us.
The plague here takes a more surreal tone.
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