The End of Men

March 15, 2021
Beginning in 2025, a Great Male Plague spreads around the world. The novels opens in London on a deceptively breezy note as Catherine, a social anthropologist with a happy marriage and adorable 3-year-old son, avoids fertility treatment because she's ambivalent about having a second child. Big mistake. Five days later, on "Day 1," a man dies for no clear reason in a Glasgow hospital. After a second man dies there two days later and more fall ill, attending physician Amanda, a wife and mother of two sons herself, senses approaching disaster. She contacts recently independent Scotland's public health officials, who dismiss her concerns. By Day 5, "the Plague," though still limited to Scotland, "is all anybody can talk about" in London. And so the Plague spreads, day by numbered day within eight sections designating stages from OUTBREAK to PANIC to ADAPTATION to REMEMBRANCE. Although women may be carriers, only males (of all ages) get sick, almost always fatally. Survivors, i.e., women, experience what survivors today have been experiencing--loss, isolation, fear, guilt, physical damage, financial crises, and, occasionally, good fortune. Catherine and Amanda, who lose the men and boys in their lives early, remain central as they reconstruct their lives. But British author Sweeney-Baird swings her focus among an ever widening swathe of characters--wealthy, working class, urban, rural, White, Black, Asian, straight, LGBTQ+, British, American, Canadian, Filipino--as if afraid to leave any social subgroup out. Shallow character development is inevitable. But a captivating standout is the portrayal of brilliant gay Canadian scientist Lisa, a villainous, much-hated savior who uses the Plague as her steppingstone to wealth and fame. Meanwhile, the loss of most of the world's male population and the ways governments react to the Plague raise complicated ethical issues. This may be just the novel you want to read right now--or the last thing you'd want to pick up. Sweeney-Baird's dystopian debut novel, begun in 2018, is unsettlingly prescient.

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May 28, 2021

DEBUT Sweeney-Baird takes on some weighty issues in her speculative near-future debut novel. It's 2025, and a Scottish doctor is dismayed by the sudden deaths of several otherwise healthy men in her hospital's ER. Over the next days and weeks, it becomes clear that they were afflicted by a plague that only targets men and is nearly always fatal. The plague's effect on the world is soon catastrophic; we see its terrible spread through the eyes of a few individuals. Their stories unfold at an intensely personal level, as scientists rush to create a vaccine, and politicians impose strict laws to ensure humanity's survival. What might a new normal look like, when everything has been upended? VERDICT Sweeney-Baird explores the consequences of dramatic changes to human cultures and societies, as survivors grieve terrible losses and struggle to cope. The publication of this haunting novel in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic may hit too close to home for some. Nevertheless, it is compelling and well-written and should appeal to fans of near-future fiction that seems all too plausible. Read this alongside Lauren Beukes's Afterland for a different take on a similar premise.--Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2021
The afterword to this chilling dystopian debut thriller, which centers on life in a more-lethal-than-COVID epidemic, notes that it was written before our current pandemic; it gets so much right, though, from day-to-day headaches to deep despair. Opening in 2025 Scotland, the novel centers on the "Male Plague," which is, at first, like flu but eventually kills almost all men and boys it touches, leaving women devastated but uninfected. Sweeney-Baird skillfully re-creates the head-spinning feeling of watching the virus pop up here, then there, and ever closer to home, and of its systematic destruction in every corner of society. Short chapters follow the doctor whose warnings are ignored; a woman who tries to outrun the virus with her son, after her husband dies; a nanny who turns the tables on her entitled employer when the sickness hits; and the virologists, both selfless and mercenary, searching for a vaccine. Sweeney-Baird's look inside the heads of these and other shocked, desperate characters and her portrait of a bizarre new world are both thought- and fear-provoking. Readers will either wolf this down or elect to stay miles away from it, but controversy moves titles off the shelf. A top choice.

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