Lewis, the author of best-selling non-fiction such as “Moneyball” and “The Big Short”, is known for attracting compelling narratives from insensitive complex topics – effects related to mortgage lending, government debt, statistics, the dull but essential mechanics government bureaucracy. His previous books have sold more than 10 million copies in total.
With ‘The Premonition’ he takes on a subject that is still unfolding. He approached the pandemic from what he describes as an unknown vantage point: the grassroots level of people leading a sort of secret shadow response to the pandemic, as top government officials falsely assured the public that the coronavirus would disappear.
‘The Premonition’ will join a growing variety of non-fiction investigating the pandemic and its impact. Recent and upcoming books include Grace Blakeley’s The Corona Crash, which looks at how the pandemic will reform capitalism; New York Times Reporter Sheri Fink’s “Surge” on the Ethical, Social, and Scientific Dimensions of the Crisis; Gabriel Sherman’s “Fever City” on New York’s response to the spread of the virus and “Preventable”, a book about the bugs that led to unnecessary cases and deaths of Covid-19, by Andy Slavitt, now a senior adviser to President Biden’s Covid response team. In June, New Yorker author Lawrence Wright released ‘The Plague Year’, which describes the origin of the coronavirus and its worldwide spread.
Lewis began reporting on the pandemic last spring and began writing in the fall. When he called his longtime editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, to tell him what he was working on, he was so excited that he started chatting and could not describe the plot.
“At one point he said, ‘Oh hell, I can not explain it, but better go write it,’ and I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea,'” Lawrence said.
Lewis hoped to get the book out as soon as possible, in time for Biden’s transition team to read it. “I felt it would be more helpful the sooner it was done,” he said.
At the same time, he feels he must wait and report on the effectiveness of the government’s pandemic response, which appears to be as disastrous as he feared, with tens of millions of Americans infected and hundreds of thousands killed.