The influenza epidemic of 1918 was the greatest human disaster of the 20th century and most likely in all recorded history. This is a moving, unique and highly prescient history, filled with eye-witness accounts.

In the dying months of the First World War, Spanish Flu suddenly overwhelmed the globe, killing up to 100 million people. it was one of the most devastating natural disasters in world history ...
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‘Offers us a coherent, well-researched and sanitary reminder that another pandemic could be just around the corner with equally horrific consequences.’ – Sir Tony Robinson
‘Fascinating … lurid and pacy … the page-turning fascination of a detective thriller.’ – BBC History Magazine
‘A remarkable job … arresting and intimate narrative.’ – New Statesman
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But behind the staggering figures are human lives, stories of those who suffered and those who fought back – at the Front, at home, in the hospitals and laboratories. Digging into archives, unpublished records, memoirs, diaries and government documents, Catharine Arnold traces the course of the disease through the accounts of those who experienced it – from those in high office to the ordinary people: the troops, nurses, miners, labourers, and many others who were left with no memorial.

100 years after the disease burned its way across the globe, this stingingly prescient book examines the lessons that devastating outbreak taught us – and those we perhaps did not learn in time, as Covid-19 wreaks havoc across the world in 2020.