The End of Men
By Christina Sweeney-Baird
Blurb
Glasgow, 2025. Dr Amanda Maclean is called to treat a patient with flu-like symptoms. Within three hours he is dead. This is how it begins.
The unknown virus sweeps through the hospital with deadly speed.
The victims are all men.
Dr Maclean raises the alarm. But by the time the authorities listen to her, the virus has spread to every corner of the world. Threatening families. Governments. Countries.
Can they find a cure before it’s too late?
Our Review
The End of Men was a magnificent book. Warning though, I was reading the book with tears streaming down my face.
The End of Men is written from the point of view of many different characters, and it is all the more powerful for it.
The book begins in London with Catherine five days before the pandemic hit with Catherine trying to decide if she is going to dress up for Halloween.
Her timeline was tough for me because Theodore reminded me of my own son, not least in his love of Halloween.
“Halloween has suddenly flipped from being a thing he had a remote understanding of last year to bring the most exciting event imaginable (until Christmas).”
I loved the way Catherine’s relationship with her husband Anthony was described.
“We’ve been together over half our lifetimes now. You don’t become two halves of a whole overnight.”
The only flaw in their otherwise perfect relationship is that Anthony wants to try IVF in pursuit of a second child, but Catherine isn’t so sure.
“If I could guarantee that a round of IVF would give me a baby, the new member of the family we’ve wanted for so long I would do it in a heartbeat. But that’s not a promise anyone can make me.”
We first meet Amanda when she inadvertently discovers patient zero in Glasgow A and E.
“His body went from being normal to near dead in under an hour.”
When Amanda realises that there appears to be a disease which only effects men she calls her oncologist husband and tells him she will divorce him if he doesn’t go home from work and pick up their sons on the way home.
Her emails to Health Protection Scotland remain unacknowledged.
Some of Amanda’s timeline made for hard reading for me as a healthcare worker who has worked through the current pandemic it sometimes felt as though she had plucked experiences right out of my head. Although with a toddler I had no choice but to go near him as he couldn’t understand.
“My sons are alive because I somehow kept this awful disease out of this home and away from them. But they are starving for my care and affection and I cannot give it to them. I don’t hug them. I don’t cook their food. I don’t go near them if I can possibly help it. I cannot be too careful when their lives are at stake.”
The funeral service for one of the men and the burial in a garden were two bits where I had to take a moment before I could carry on reading.
The End of Men was unnerving at times in terms of how close it came to the advice from government and the growing death toll on the news.
I cannot stress enough how excellent this book is.
“Will my gorgeous baby boy die? Will my husband die? Will everyone catch it? Will there be a cure? What is this never ends? What if this is the end of the world as we know it?”
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 11 Times.
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