Don't Breathe

What if the virus had been worse? Harry Turtledove—“The Master of Alternate History” (Publishers Weekly)—rewrites the year everyone remembers.

January 2020 arrives exactly as everyone remembers it: a new virus in the news, a distant worry scrolling past on a screen. Ishmael Weinberg—seventy-one, a historical novelist married to a mystery writer, owned by a small Siamese cat—first hears about it while procrastinating on Twitter.

But this is not our COVID. This one kills one of every seven people it infects.

Told in alternating chapters by Ishmael, at home in Los Angeles, and his daughter Sarah, a CNN stringer in Japan whose first assignment of the crisis is a quarantined cruise ship, Don’t Breathe follows one family through a year in which history jumps the rails. Sarah reports from the edge of the catastrophe, then from inside it. Ishmael, who has spent a lifetime writing other people’s centuries, watches his own come apart: overwhelmed funeral homes, armed crowds gathering in open defiance of every precaution, conspiracy theories breeding faster than the virus—and a presidential election held while the country holds its breath.

Turtledove has made a career of asking what if. The South wins the Civil War. An alien invasion interrupts the Second World War. He has never asked it this close to home—and never of a history every reader can check against their own memory.

A complete standalone novel of alternate history from the New York Times bestselling author of The Guns of the South. For readers of Station Eleven’s pandemic elegy and The End of October’s outbreak realism—told with the dry wit and domestic warmth Turtledove’s readers know.