Christina Sweeney-Baird has produced something really special. A book about a pandemic, that you can read whilst living through a pandemic without feeling alarmed. I thought the premise was excellent and enjoyed contemplating some of the questions and issues raised.

From the opening page, I was hooked. My favourite character was Helen. Her scenes with errant husband Sean which occur later in the book are hilarious and so relatable. As a Scot, I loved the sections of the book set here and the notion of an Independent Republic of Scotland. Of course I loved Amanda too and felt her frustration seeping from the pages.

"The End of Men" would make a brilliant book club choice due to the scope for extensive discussion. I would read it again.

I approached this book with a bit of trepidation because the subject matter is about a pandemic that sweeps the world and we've had enough of that in real life. This pandemic, however, only affects men and the story overs six years following the death of 90% of males, following a few characters.. I found it a great dystopian read..

Wow, don’t want to speak too soon but this definitely the book to read of 2021, I understand that to some it might feel like it’s a bit close to home but it’s a great read.

The way the story was told and it flows so naturally and I loved all of the characters stories.

It's very hard to believe this was written pre-pandemic. So many similarities and echoes of our own present reality. Only, in the fictional virus in the End of Men, it truly is just men that are effected by it. The story isn't told in a linear fashion, nor is it even told by a single protagonist. It's more of a piecing together of news articles, snippets of the character's lives,

It does feel a little hurriedly edited, as if the book had originally a planned release in 2022 but had to be sped along in order to still be timely. This becomes especially apparent in some more "gotcha" moment, things that are eerily close to our current situation.

However, the virus in this book is very different to "our" current pandemic. Thank God. Because the alternate one is even worse. The mortality rate seems to be at about 90%, leaving the population decimated and the expected chaos ensues.

This is definitely a book I'll go back to reading once this current pandemic is over, as it's all a bit overwhelming and a little "too real" to stomach at the moment.

It's hard to believe this book was written years before this pandemic as it reflects what's happening.
A fascinating dystopia with a cast of well thought characters, great world building and good storytelling.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

We are all now experts in pandemics. This book was written before COVID 19 spread, but it predicts so many of the responses that we saw that it hardly seems fictional, and I felt myself judging the story in how it compared to real life.
The story starts off in a quiet domestic setting which sets the scene for how much will be lost as the story progresses. The first intimations of the disease are dramatic, deaths occur immediately, and there is awareness of the severity of the situation, but for the wider public the news spreads slowly. There are many strands and characters woven through the book giving different viewpoints on what is happening, and I found these did manage to cover many of the responses that I think would happen in the case of this specific a disease. The specificness of the disease, in that it causes symptoms and death only in men, gives a different perspective to the story. The world is not only fighting against the disease but how society would struggle with so many key players removed. It′s thought-provoking but not a diatribe against the patriarchy since so many of the viewpoints are about the intense anxiety and sorrow which comes from losing loved ones.

The search for a vaccine takes a different path in this book, and the result as well as the widespread devastation actually helped to make this book more encouraging than you might think for a pandemic-themed book during a pandemic. At the end I could only think, it could have been a lot worse.


I had a copy of this book early through Netgalley

Wow what a book. The End of Men tells the story of a virus sweeping the world which only kills the male population. The author wrote it a few years before the current pandemic we find ourselves in now and it's scary how accurate some of the story is.
I would highly recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for my ARC.

This book tells the story of a virus which only kills the males in the population. It was written before the current pandemic and it is scarily accurate to many things that are happening now. There are alot of characters in the book but I found them easy to follow and I enjoyed reading their stories and how they dealt with the situations they were in.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC.

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird is a speculative fiction novel about a pandemic, which she somehow managed to write just before Covid 19 changed all our lives. Obviously she is a witch and is welcome to join my coven at any time.

First things first, I loved this book. However I am fortunate in that I am one of the lucky people whose family and friends have remained (touch wood) relatively unscathed by Covid 19. Even with that caveat in place, it transpired that I had some emotional stuff stored up and there were segments of this book I found very upsetting. In part I think that is commendable on the part of the writer that she got so much of this book right in terms of the reaction and fallout, however, for people who have suffered significant loss as a result of Covid, this book may not be for them. Had I known what I know now about this book, I might have let it lie for a while before I dived in.

In this book, which is set a few years in the future, there is an outbreak of an illness which gets the name the Male Plague. Women can carry the disease, but it only affects men and 9 out of 10 of the infected men die from it. The book has multiple narrators, across the world, nearly all female and we follow them as they deal with their own personal crises as loved male family members die, as entire governments are wiped out and the social fallout begins.

The book opens in an independent Scotland where a female A&E consultant is the first person to notice that this might be a highly contagious fatal disease. She follows protocol and reports the issue to Public Health Scotland who immediately dismiss her as an "hysterical lunatic" and fail to do anything.

What follows then will feel all too familiar to all of us, as the outbreak spreads around the world, and governments scramble to manage the crisis. This was one part of the book that I found tough to deal with. We all went through this, whether we have personal experience of Covid or not. I am a single parent and in the early days I was terrified of becoming ill and leaving my daughter behind. These were some of the feelings that I had shoved to the back of the cupboard and forgotten about thankfully, but the opening chapters of this book brought it all flooding back.

Once the plague has scoured the earth, the now mostly female population is left to rebuild. I really liked the examination and detail that Sweeney-Baird paid to this particular part of the novel. I work for local government and I can tell you there is a lot of stuff that gets done that most members of the public don't notice until it's not being done anymore and it seemed to me that a lot of thought had gone into the "What if all the bin men died? What if a substantial part of the police force just wasn't there anymore? What about road maintenance? Food production?" the list goes on. At this point, Sweeney-Baird is wearing her feminist credentials proudly on her sleeve, because the women who are left at the top start getting those jobs filled and society moving again. There is a huge nod to the Leslie Knopes of this world, which had me screaming with laughter and punching the air. For anyone who is a fan of Caroline Criado-Perez's book Invisible Women, there is also a small scene in which a female mechanic quotes for work to make one character's car more woman friendly. Little acknowledgement to women still paying the female tax when even most of the men are gone.

Sweeney-Baird also does not take the easy route and make all the women left behind into healing angels. One character is a virologist who is the first to create a vaccine for the Male Plague. Does she give the vaccine away for nothing and unite the world in peace and harmony? No she does not. Everyone hates her and she doesn't care, she wants to get paid for her work. Women getting paid for their work is a feminist ideal in itself but to see it subverted like this is really compelling and an interesting way of examining what feminism is and why it applies in some cases but not in others.

I have also noted in the past, that similar books with a "Kill all Men/Women" disease as their central point, come in for criticism from the LGBTQ community, for often failing to acknowledge they exist at all. This book does not do that. I am not LGBTQ myself, so it may be inappropriate for me to judge how well these segments of the book are done, but there are gay and trans people in this book, which is really refreshing.

While the book definitely had a feminist leaning (and I was ready to book my ticket to travel to this post men world) it is not a I Hate Men book. There is a real examination of the grief and difficulty caused by the loss of men, on a personal and societal level. Yes some things seem better, but for the female characters who have lost fathers, husbands, sons, brothers you really sense the struggle for those characters to rebuild their lives in a world where they might never experience those relationships again.

So to sum up: I adored this book and highly recommend it, but be gentle with yourself when reading it, have tissues on hand. And maybe give it a pass if a pandemic novel is not what you need right now. It will still be here later

In the near future - 2025 - a lethal virus, killing only men, is first identified in a Glasgow hospital, though no-one initially wants to listen to A&E consultant Amanda Maclean. Before long, though, it becomes impossible to ignore that something very bad is happening.

As the crisis deepens, governments panic and flounder. There are riots, shootings, a civil war in China. And husbands, sons, fathers and brothers are dying all over the world in unimaginable numbers.

It's really hard to believe that this book was written before the start of the current pandemic, because although there are - thankfully - significant differences (the virus affects only men, though women can be carriers, and is far more lethal, killing almost all sufferers within a few days of infection), there is also a lot that feels eerily similar, for instance: "I go out to get food, briefly and carefully as late as possible in the quiet of night time, touching no one, standing near no one." Sound familiar? A foreword by the author comments on how the prophetic aspects of the story resulted in her being dubbed "Cassandra" by some.

We see the progression of the pandemic over a considerable period of time via various people's stories - some followed throughout, like Amanda, the doctor who first identified the virus, and who is determined to track it back to its source; Catherine, an anthropologist; scientists working on a vaccine - and some whose experiences we only glimpse briefly - a woman working as a maid in Singapore, another whose remote Scottish farm becomes home to evacuated teenage boys, a man trapped on a cruise liner off the Icelandic coast. There's a lot of tragedy, inevitably, and devastating social and economic changes and upheavals as men become a small minority of the population. Meanwhile, US journalist Maria Ferreira charts the progress of the pandemic through a series of articles.

There are some very acute observations; for instance, intimidating a male intruder into fleeing by using the threat of infection, one woman comments: "This must be what men used to feel like. My mere physical presence is enough to terrify someone into running. No wonder they used to get drunk on it."

Inevitably there are huge swathes of stories left untold - as well as the UK and Scotland (by 2025 an independent republic), the US and Canada we see snippets from China, Singapore and New Zealand, but the effects of the "Plague" on Africa, for instance, are unknown.

There were several times when I doubted the wisdom of my decision to read this book during a real life pandemic especially early on. There's so much loss for almost all of the characters and it's heartbreaking at times (although strangely I only had tears in my eyes once, and that was at a moment of hope rather than despair).

A fascinating read and a very impressive debut novel, but only if you're feeling strong enough to take it...

It's the year 2025 and in Scotland a male patient has come in to the ER and after only a few days dies of an unknown virus. This is the start of a pandemic that only appears to affect males.
This is a topical book to read at the moment ! The story is told in a series of viewpoints from various people all over the world as they or family members are affected by the virus. It touches on a lot of what we are currently going through -Its a heartfelt, emotional and interesting read. I really enjoyed it and found myself agreeing with some of the story as it is so current !
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read this thrilling read.

This is a book I found impossible to put down it was one of those reads that just took over every spare minute I had and even when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it. Reading a book about a pandemic whilst we are in the middle of one is a strange experience and although the virus in the book only affects men it sure made uncomfortable reading at times. There is so much going on in the book and many different points of view it deals with issues that you can never imagine, women losing husbands and sons, men dying worldwide and the race to find a vaccine are just some.
I must praise the complexity of the read and the stunning writing Christina Sweeney-Baird has done an amazing job in dealing with grief, loss and sadness whilst also making this a read that you won’t want to put down. Please don’t be put off by the subject matter this read is so much more than just a story about a pandemic it had friendships, hope and love making it a read that was amazing.
So a book I loved and a book that made me think and I love that in a read it’s one that I really can highly recommend.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins UK, The Borough Press for giving me the chance to read the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Extraordinarily prescient and profoundly thought-provoking, The End of Men is set in the near future and opens in a Glasgow hospital in 2025 with no-nonsense A & E consultant, Dr Amanda Maclean, facing worrying signs of a potentially lethal virus. As a number of men present with flu like symptoms that escalate to death within hours it is Amanda who identifies Patient Zero, suggests that the virus is lethal to males alone and yet is ignored by public health authorities. An explosion of cases see the virus become a global pandemic with previously inconceivable implications for every aspect of society.

Dealing with her own personal grief as a wife and mother of two sons and yet determined to be heard and actually identify the source, Amanda is an inspirational figure. Her first-person narrative is just one of several that are followed and dominate the story along with that of an anthropology lecturer, a civil servant and one of the team engaged in the pursuit of a vaccine. There are arguably too many minor characters included in the book and it is impossible to connect with them all, however I am in awe of the scope of the novel with the author considering everything from enforced evacuations to same-sex dating and managing changes in the labour market. Yet despite the very obvious trauma and the death toll it is the characters resilience and human nature’s ability to adapt that imbues the novel with a burgeoning sense of hope.

Although a great premise, from a personal point of view I struggled with the multiple perspectives the story was told from. Not aimed specifically at this book, it's something I've struggled with before.

I can’t help wondering how I might have reviewed this book if I wasn’t twelve months into an actual pandemic and I do honestly think I would have boon more positive. I’m more knowledgeable about how timescales work out and how people and governments react plus it failed somewhat for me on the science front Too many characters so never built up much feeling for any of them. Amused at the Scotland getting Independence though.

Thank you to netgalley.co.uk for giving me a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

When I requested this book, I didn't think of the title but I found a little funny when I realised what it was about given the pandemic we are living through right now. I feel because of the current pandemic, we will start to start to see a lot of novels like this one but I enjoyed this one. The storyline was interesting, this was the first book I have read that talked about men dying off, not women. Knowing that the author wrote this in 2018 makes it interesting because it is quite similar to what is going on now. I couldn't put it down.

I was absolutely blown away by this debut from Christina Sweeney-Baird and The End Of Men is definitely one of those books that will stay in my head for a long time to come. Written pre-Covid, this tale of a global pandemic systematically effecting the male population is so clever and so prescient that the boundaries of fact and fiction continually crossed over in my reading. The book is structured through the stories of an array of women from normal everyday people, to medical professionals, to researchers, to those working on vaccines, with each of their voices brilliantly well-defined throughout. It was impossible to not make a personal connection with at least some of these women experiencing either the loss of the men in their lives, or those becoming empowered in their own right without male influence. It’s fair to say that the reader will experience a gamut of emotions in the course of this book as it ebbs and flows from extreme emotion and poignancy to the world of cold hard facts and the development of a global cure for this decimating virus. Having recently read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, I was extremely taken with the way that Sweeney-Baird begins to structure her world where women move into the foreground of previously very male dominated institutions and employment. She demonstrates clearly in this novel how the world does indeed march to the will of men from politics, to academia, to very normal everyday things as the designs of simple objects that work for men only. Beautifully researched and a totally absorbing rendition of a fictional world that now in the light of current times doesn’t seem that far from reality. Highly recommended.

Written pre-covid, but clearly edited during it (which in many ways adds to the 'a-ha' tension and a couple of laughs, including,a nice little joke about the 'typical' delay time for planes in 2020), The End of Men is arresting from the off, but very quickly settles into exactly the same territory as The Power. This, I suspect, was entirely the point at time of writing - Alderman's novel one of the more successful to tap into the dystopian trend for shifts in sexual/political power in literature since The Handmaid's Tale got its new on-screen lease of life (and for which none other than Atwood provided mentorship for). Which means we're in pretty safe storytelling hands - but also meant that everything played out pretty much as expected, but also that parts of the novel read as if they're playing catch-up on what living through covid has shown as 'reality'.
I was fortunate to read an ARC, but this seriously, seriously needs careful copy-editing - the number of basic-to-serious errors in the text suggest how close to the wire the editing process has been on this book. Hope they're caught in subsequent proofs! 3.5 stars for me

Reading this book would make an impact in normal times: reading it in the middle of a pandemic was harrowing. But this didn't put me off, as I devoured this book. I couldn't put it down. It's beautifully written, and even though the narrative is split between multiple narrative voices, I was drawn in to their situation. What interested me most, though, was that although this novel has - justifiably - been compared to Naomi Alderman's The Power, in that it depicts a world in which women become the dominant gender, it takes a very different approach. Men in this novel are not generally depicted as oppressors or abusers, but as loving and loved husbands, fathers and children, and their loss is deeply felt. Indeed, as the active period of the pandemic is dealt with in the first third of the novel, the rest becomes a study of grief and recuperation, as Sweeny-Baird explores what it might be like if the experience of recent bereavement was universal. Although there are hints as the novel goes on that things have changed profoundly, in that society is now shaped around women in a way it has never been before, that doesn't cancel out the loss of so many loved ones. Overall, I though this book was well-written, sensitive and compelling, and I predict it's going to be a runaway bestseller when it's published. I certainly intend to buy copies for my friends (and I don't often say that about a book).

Ok I hated this. I requested it as an arc from NetGalley as, possibly controversially, I love pandemic books. This one, about a virus killing off all men intrigued me, but when I started listening I realised there wasn’t really anywhere they could or were taking it. Another thing, the book had what felt like 30 different perspectives and stories. I couldn’t keep up and so little was said about each one I felt I didn’t care about anyone. I really think the book should have focused on one or two of the characters with the strongest plot line and gone with that. This book just wasn’t for me.