click for homepage


The Barcelona Review

Answers


Literature of Pandemics

The ANSWERS (to the quiz, not to the problem of pandemics...)


If you wish to have a go before looking at the answers click HERE


Name the novel:

1.  Beginning with a man who goes blind while waiting for a traffic light to change, his affliction soon becomes a city-wide contagion, and people are rounded up into asylums where violence is rampant. 
Blindness by Jose Saramago

2.  Explores events in the fictional town of Commonwealth, Washington, in 1918 during World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic. The town agrees to quarantine itself from the outside world, hoping to escape the international epidemic of the flu.
The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen

3.  After the wonder drug BlyssPluss is widely distributed, a global pandemic, deliberately caused by it, breaks out and begins wiping out the human race and causing mass chaos outside of the protected compound.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

4.  In this post-apocalyptic horror novel, a car crash at a petrol station accidentally sparks the spreading of a deadly super-flu, a virus engineered by the government.
The Stand by Stephen King

5.  This thriller follows a woman's attempts to understand the death of her child, leading to her uncovering a sinister government plot involving a virus called 'Wuhan-400', which has a kill-rate of 100 per cent, developed as the “perfect” biological weapon.
The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz

6.  When a deadly plague forces the people of the town of Oran into quarantine, hysteria mounts and people respond with anger, fear or blame, sewing further paranoia and division amongst the group.
The Plague by Albert Camus

7.   A worldwide epidemic from Shenzhen, China, sweeps through New York City, which becomes a ghost town.
Severance by Ling Ma

8.  This novel opens with a performance of King Lear on the night that a flu pandemic breaks out in America, which ravages the world in 20 years’ time. Still, even after the apocalypse, there is Shakespeare. 
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

9.   Set in a Manhattan segregated by a virus that has divided people into the infected (flesh-eating and mortally contagious zombies) and uninfected, we follow one of the people tasked with removing the former while working to keep order.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead

10.  In a novel about race and class and love, the background is a pandemic of cholera, killing thousands, while a cannon was shot regularly because people believed that gunpowder could stop the epidemic.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

© 2020 tbr

The Barcelona Review is a registered non-profit organization