It’s ten years since a deadly pandemic swept the globe, and five years since the last new case. Society came close to collapse, but now there’s a vaccine – though not a cure – people are only dying in the usual ways. 

Lukas, along with several hundred other infected people, is quarantined in a camp on a mountain in Central Asia. With nothing to do, and no future to speak of, the inmates pass the time drinking, taking drugs, joining a cult, making outsider art, having sex with whoever they can. 

In New York, Rebecca is a scientist who worked on the vaccine that saved the world. Having lost her partner in the years of chaos, she keeps testing the vaccine against mutations of the virus, because it seems inevitable that there will be a next time. 

Quarantine is a thrillingly intelligent but very human novel about how we – as individuals, and a society – deal with the aftermath of catastrophe. 

Out now in hardback from Swift Press. The book has received coverage in Literary Review, The Scotsman, The Herald, The Daily Mail, and on BBC Radio Scotland.