The Premonition

A Pandemic Story

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo

Brought to you by Penguin.
'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.'
In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again.
This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.
The Premonition is the extraordinary story of a group who anticipated, traced and hunted the coronavirus; who understood the need to think differently, to learn from history, to question everything; and to do all of this fast, in order to act, to save lives, communities, society itself. It's a story about the workings of the human mind; about the failures and triumphs of human judgment and imagination. It's the story of how we got to now.
© Michael Lewis 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critic reviews

When the stories of our times are told, there will be no more seminal documents than the books of Michael Lewis.

He is so good everyone else may as well pack up.

Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.

Superb ... It is tremendous fun, tremendously told. There is a lot to take from it - about the inertia of the US civil service, about the "malignant obedience" of middle managers, about how people fearful of the pandemic were treated with the "wary indulgence of the sane in the presence of the fanatic" ... Among those truths, in a familiar lesson for much of the world this year, is the danger of hubris. (Tom Whipple)

A gripping story ... This is a book about some brave, curious people who tried hard to swim against the tide. As always in a Lewis book they are brought vividly alive ... Lewis is a master of his form. (Christina Patterson)

A fluid intellectual thriller ... As always with Lewis, the book is full of fascinating facts and personal angles. (Steven Poole)

[Reading The Premonition] we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people's lives over ideas and ingrained structures. (Kazuo Ishiguro)

It is hard to think of a writer who has had more success than Michael Lewis at turning forbiddingly complex situations into propulsive nonfiction narratives ... Without his ever having to spell it out, Lewis's message comes across very powerfully: the US government, in its institutional dysfunction, is in danger of abandoning its citizens to a private sector that is even less equipped to deal with large-scale disasters such as Covid. (Mark O’Connell)

Classic Mike Lewis - VERY enjoyable.

Reads like a thriller. Unbelievable how fragmented the US healthcare system is and how badly the Federal government behaved. A few heroes come to the fore.

Narration

The content was fascinating but the narration was really poor. The narrator doesn’t seem to grasp how to pause in the correct places and really detracted from the book which is a great pity

Excellent story marred by very poor narration

This is a fascinating look into the handling of the pandemic. Very well written. The narration was disappointing. The narrator may suit other types of books but, in this case, the narrator had poor diction and a jarring vocal lilt. This was a shame as it distracted from a very good story.

A well-told case study

This is Lewis's normal tasty and nutritious fare, served up beautifully by narrator Ojo. Her tone pairs perfectly with his writing.

Horrible narration

As others have noted, it feels like it’s read by AI, some sort of text to speech. Its painful to listen to, this has never happened to me. I’ve tried to return it but was unable to, but I’m really not sure what’s going on. There’s no way this is meant to sound like this.