Year of Wonders

“Year of Wonders” by Geraldine Brooks is a vivid, painfully relevant, and unexpectedly comforting story about a catastrophic plague epidemic. 1665 is a terrible year—the year of the Great Plague in London. A monstrous epidemic spreads relentlessly, but for a while it stays quiet across the country—and together with a bundle of infected fabric it reaches a small village. A priest tells the locals that the disease is a trial sent by God, and the villagers decide to isolate themselves in their village so they won’t carry the contagion further. Horror grows gradually, and soon all people have left is to pray. The plague doesn’t take the young widow Anna—the servant—who, along with the wife of the priest, starts caring for the dying. But sometimes you don’t know what is more deadly: the epidemic itself or the superstitions and the all-consuming fear that grips the villagers. In the village, a brutal hunt for witches begins… Yet selflessness, steadfastness, and mercy can turn the most terrible year into a year of wonders.