Containment of a crisis that will prompt serious thought

BEFORE THIS IS OVER Amanda Hickie Loot.co.za (R344) Little Brown

AUTHOR Amanda Hickie was living in Canada when severe acute respiratory syndrome – Sars – hit Toronto in 2003. The panicked response to that outbreak, spread first by travellers returning from Asia and then among healthcare workers and patients at Toronto hospitals, fuels Hickie’s chilling new novel, Before This is Over.

As the novel opens, the deadly Manba virus is threatening to reach Sydney, Australia, where Hannah, a cancer survivor and mother of two, is preoccupied with disaster preparations that annoy her husband.

An impending crisis is almost fun, an excuse to be selfish with a mild risk of looking a little foolish – until she must actually shut her family inside their home.

Within the confines of their house, Hannah feels like a hero and her family relaxes. The couple bickers, their kids get bored; breakfast has to be made, followed by lunch, and then there’s dinner. Hannah obsessively checks the rising death toll online, but that’s not as jarring as the sudden loss of electricity or the reappearance of a neighbour.

Hickie packs mundane moments with a building sense of dread: Will Hannah’s miscalculation about the amount of toilet paper one person uses be a fatal mistake, or just another inconvenience in their little domestic adventure?

Reading Before This is Over in Miami, just a few months after the city became the epicentre of a Zika outbreak in the US, Hannah’s reaction to a viral threat feels fresh and accurate.

From her scepticism over the government’s containment efforts, to her smug relief when her preparations appear to pay off, Hannah’s insistence that her children are more important than anyone else’s family raises haunting questions, not only about how far you’d go to protect yourself in a crisis, but also about whether anyone will make more intelligent decisions the next time public health is threatened on a hemispheric scale.

Hannah never seems afraid until it occurs to her that her quiet suburban street has remained so quiet throughout the Manba plague because her neighbours had the same idea as she did.

Before This is Over follows similar suspenseful lines as the post-apocalyptic On the Beach, which follows the day-to-day experiences of a group awaiting the fallout from nuclear war – but Hickie finds more to fear in disasters that have already happened than in any abstract threat. – Washington Post

Hickie unpacks mundane moments with a building sense of dread