Why read This Devastating Fever?

Book cover of This Devastating Fever

Book description

Sometimes you need to go deep into the past, to make sense of the present.

Alice had not expected to spend the first twenty years of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start…

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Why read it?

1 author picked This Devastating Fever as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Alison Booth

Author

This is a book that I loved for its ambition, cleverness, great writing, and its occasional humour.

The novel tells the story of the life of Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, and at the same time relates the story of a woman called Alice during the COVID pandemic who is writing a story of the life of Leonard Woolf. The title comes from Leonard Woolf’s description of sexual love – this devastating fever – but the novel is far more than this, including major events such as the COVID epidemic, Spanish influenza, life prior to World War 1, and the threat…

From Alison's 3 favorite reads in 2023.