Phase Six

The uncannily prescient new work of fiction--"the great novel of the COVID-19 era" (Karen Russell)--from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Book of Aron.

In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, eleven-year-old Aleq and his best friend, Malik, are frequent trespassers on a nearby mining site exposed to long-buried, now thawing, permafrost. What they pick up there and carry back to their settlement is more deadly than anyone could have imagined. Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification as the likely index patient and his radical isolation. We also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC. A spare and gripping pandemic novel that reads like a sequel to the coronavirus crisis, Phase Six reminds us of the crucial bonds that form in the midst of catastrophe. Written before the outbreak of COVID-19, it's both a chamber piece of multiple intimate perspectives and a more omniscient, startlingly prescient glimpse into the megastructures--political, cultural, and biological--that inform such a disaster.