The Premonition cover art

The Premonition

A Pandemic Story

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The Premonition

By: Michael Lewis
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
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About this listen

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

 Biological Sciences Corporate & Public Finance Economics Macroeconomics Science China Thought-Provoking

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Critic reviews

When the stories of our times are told, there will be no more seminal documents than the books of Michael Lewis.
He is so good everyone else may as well pack up.
Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.
Superb ... It is tremendous fun, tremendously told. There is a lot to take from it - about the inertia of the US civil service, about the "malignant obedience" of middle managers, about how people fearful of the pandemic were treated with the "wary indulgence of the sane in the presence of the fanatic" ... Among those truths, in a familiar lesson for much of the world this year, is the danger of hubris. (Tom Whipple)
A gripping story ... This is a book about some brave, curious people who tried hard to swim against the tide. As always in a Lewis book they are brought vividly alive ... Lewis is a master of his form. (Christina Patterson)
A fluid intellectual thriller ... As always with Lewis, the book is full of fascinating facts and personal angles. (Steven Poole)
[Reading The Premonition] we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people's lives over ideas and ingrained structures. (Kazuo Ishiguro)
It is hard to think of a writer who has had more success than Michael Lewis at turning forbiddingly complex situations into propulsive nonfiction narratives ... Without his ever having to spell it out, Lewis's message comes across very powerfully: the US government, in its institutional dysfunction, is in danger of abandoning its citizens to a private sector that is even less equipped to deal with large-scale disasters such as Covid. (Mark O’Connell)
All stars
Most relevant
The person reading this doesn’t seem able to anticipate where any given sentence may go and frequently seems simply to be reading a series of words in. the. order. in. which. they. appear. I lasted about 10 minutes. What a shame - because it’s a promising story.

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Well worth a listen. Lots of insight, information and narrated extremely well - I could have listened for much longer.

Compelling

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A compelling and comprehensive telling of governmental failure in the face of a pandemic. It is hard not to be angry listening to how badly government squandered the work of scientists who knew how such a pandemic should be handled.

How Science Can Save Us and How Administrations It

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I always seem to find Michael Lewis's books fascinating, and this one was better than most, although I felt let down by the narrator, who has a sing-song delivery using 3 notes up and down, which muddled the emphasis on some words and made it harder than necessary to follow. But follow I did, because I learned so much about how Covid was handled by the US government, and the history of the CDC. Great personalities described, and behind the scenes drama laid out. A great book, which needed a proofreader.

A gripping subject with surprises

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I found story too chaotic and too familiar probably the same as pandemics itself. It was difficult to follow storyline, often because of monotonous voice. I couldn't bear some of the overdramatic metaphors author used. I felt like it was an artificial extension of reality with almost no added value.

Too soon this book was written

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