The Plague
Daniel Defoe was five years old when the bubonic plague swept London in the summer and autumn of 1665, killing roughly a quarter of the city. Fifty-seven years later, drawing on his uncle's eyewitness journals, parish bills of mortality, and an exhaustive habit of research, he published A Journal of the Plague Year, narrated by an imagined saddler named H. F. who has decided not to flee. H. F. walks the empty streets of Aldgate and Whitechapel, eavesdrops on grocers and grave-pit attendants, watches red crosses go up on locked doors, listens to the carts cry bring out your dead, and counts the city's slow, fragile recovery. Defoe's 1722 work sits between novel and reportage, a foundational piece of historical fiction whose patient arithmetic of doors barred and parishes lost still shapes how the English-speaking world imagines an epidemic from the inside.
Where The Plague keeps showing up
Four of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Plague
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a quiet morning in 1940s Oran, Algeria, Doctor Bernard Rieux finds a dead rat outside his office. As the rats and then people begin dying, the French authorities seal the city. Rieux works through the long quarantine alongside a journalist, a priest, a clerk, and a stranger named Tarrou.
The most commonly searched is The Plague (La Peste, 1947) by Albert Camus, an existentialist novel set during a plague outbreak in Oran, Algeria. Daniel Defoe wrote A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a different work.
Yes. The Plague had a major resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many readers found Camus's depiction of community, isolation, and absurd suffering newly relevant. The novel returned to bestseller lists in 2020.
The Plague is 164 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Plague takes most readers 2 to 4 hours to finish.
The Plague is a standalone novel by Daniel Defoe, not part of a series.
The Plague is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
