A Journal of the Plague Year

A Journal of the Plague Year is Daniel Defoe's reconstruction of the bubonic plague outbreak in the London of 1665.

The plague swept throughout London, claiming over 97,000 lives.

'A Journal' follows Defoe's fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London.

Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets empty; some with crosses on their doors, overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. Every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.

Defoe deftly entangles the reader in a saga of an entire city's mortal combat with an enemy more powerful and inscrutable than any previously known.

Defoe's classic reconstruction of the Great Plague of 1665 is perhaps the most compelling account of natural disaster in all literature.

Narrated by an imaginary 'Citizen who continued all the while in London', A Journal of the Plague Year scans the streets and alleyways of the stricken capital in its effort to record the appalling suffering of plague victims.

At once horrifying and movingly compassionate, it is a nightmare vision of an entire city laid to waste.

DANIEL DEFOE (16601731) was an English writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. A prolific writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. He is best remembered for his masterworks, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year.

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