THE END OF MEN

Beginning in 2025, a Great Male Plague spreads around the world.

The novels opens in London on a deceptively breezy note as Catherine, a social anthropologist with a happy marriage and adorable 3-year-old son, avoids fertility treatment because she’s ambivalent about having a second child. Big mistake. Five days later, on “Day 1,” a man dies for no clear reason in a Glasgow hospital. After a second man dies there two days later and more fall ill, attending physician Amanda, a wife and mother of two sons herself, senses approaching disaster. She contacts recently independent Scotland's public health officials, who dismiss her concerns. By Day 5, “the Plague,” though still limited to Scotland, “is all anybody can talk about” in London. And so the Plague spreads, day by numbered day within eight sections designating stages from OUTBREAK to PANIC to ADAPTATION to REMEMBRANCE. Although women may be carriers, only males (of all ages) get sick, almost always fatally. Survivors, i.e., women, experience what survivors today have been experiencing—loss, isolation, fear, guilt, physical damage, financial crises, and, occasionally, good fortune. Catherine and Amanda, who lose the men and boys in their lives early, remain central as they reconstruct their lives. But British author Sweeney-Baird swings her focus among an ever widening swathe of characters—wealthy, working class, urban, rural, White, Black, Asian, straight, LGBTQ+, British, American, Canadian, Filipino—as if afraid to leave any social subgroup out. Shallow character development is inevitable. But a captivating standout is the portrayal of brilliant gay Canadian scientist Lisa, a villainous, much-hated savior who uses the Plague as her steppingstone to wealth and fame. Meanwhile, the loss of most of the world’s male population and the ways governments react to the Plague raise complicated ethical issues. This may be just the novel you want to read right now—or the last thing you'd want to pick up.

Sweeney-Baird’s dystopian debut novel, begun in 2018, is unsettlingly prescient.