The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Michael Lewis

May 2021 · Allen Lane · Narrated by Adenrele Ojo

About this audiobook

Brought to you by Penguin.
'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.'
In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again.
This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.
The Premonition is the extraordinary story of a group who anticipated, traced and hunted the coronavirus; who understood the need to think differently, to learn from history, to question everything; and to do all of this fast, in order to act, to save lives, communities, society itself. It's a story about the workings of the human mind; about the failures and triumphs of human judgment and imagination. It's the story of how we got to now.
© Michael Lewis 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Ratings and reviews

Very disappointing seeing this great author and story ruined by the narrator who is painful to listen to. Seriously, it's amazing how this book can be so good and bad at the same time. Really stressful to listen to her horrible voice while trying to concentrate on the interesting topic. I kids of wish I could get a refund to be honest.

Michael Lewis narrates the story of how pandemic could have been prevented or impact reduced if US systems had not been thrashed by several administrations successively. Just like global financial crisis it was known that it would happen with some disease. The narrative is through the story of real people. However history will repeat. Just watch.

Amazing pandemic book written by an incredible author.

About the author

Michael Lewis's global bestselling books lift the lid on the biggest stories of our times. They include Flash Boys, a game-changing exposé of high-speed scamming; The Big Short, which was made into a hit Oscar-winning film; Liar's Poker, the book that defined the excesses of the 1980s; and, most recently, The Fifth Risk, revealing what happens when democracy unravels. Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics.