The Great Mortality

John Kelly's richly detailed history of the medieval Black Death was published in 2005 but comes into its own as an audiobook in the age of COVID-19. Critics and readers have criticized Kelly for personifying the plague as a sensate being racing hungrily from town to town and country to country. But with polished elegance, narrator Matthew Lloyd Davies captures the grim ironies and mordant humor that underlie Kelly's account. Much in the spirit of Poe's horror stories and Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," this lively narrative balances solid historical research with a penetrating analysis of the human response to disaster, It's a timely window into the distant past, and into our own troubled present. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine