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The Black Death

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Thomas Asbridge’s remarkable new book reveals the global impact of humanity’s greatest natural disaster, and the terrible human cost of this calamity.

In the mid-fourteenth century, a lethal plague struck the medieval world, causing unimaginable suffering and destruction. This terrifying pandemic – the Black Death – was unquestionably one of history’s defining episodes, yet a critical feature of its progress has often been ignored: the disease was not confined to Europe, but rather affected almost all of the known world, including the Near and Middle East, Byzantium, north Africa and Asia.

Tracing the pandemic’s course across the medieval globe, The Black Death contrasts the experiences of different peoples, including Christians, Muslims and Jews, charting this catastrophe’s transformative effects on diverse aspects of medieval life. And crucially, Asbridge demonstrates that the plague was often at its most destructive in the Islamic world, where it ultimately played a role in the collapse of the mighty Mamluk Empire.

The Black Death also brings the human drama of this calamitous era to life, evoking the terror and the turmoil that beset cities such as London, Cairo and Florence. Asbridge reconstructs the lives of the men, women and children who faced the Black Death – from ruling monarchs to peasant farmers – laying bare both the abject horror they endured and the courageous resolve they often demonstrated while striving to survive.

Uncovering a story that speaks to our own age, The Black Death highlights humankind’s capacity for compassion and resilience amidst a global crisis to explain how the medieval world confronted, and ultimately overcame, this shattering pandemic.

© Thomas Asbridge 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

Learned but horribly compelling… Asbridge skilfully combines a global narrative of the plague with examples of horrendous personal tragedy to build a powerful portrait of a world that stared death in the face
The Times
A magisterial history of one of the worst ever pandemics [which] focuses on the individuals caught up in the chaos
Guardian
A gripping and authoritative global history… Asbridge handles the science of the plague as confidently as its history… The Black Death’s impeccable, wide-ranging scholarship and its suitability for a general audience make it an impressive achievement
Financial Times
An up-to-the-hour work of scholarship that is at the same time a page turner: intimate stories of suffering, death and resilience are situated in large scale social, cultural and economic histories of the ravages of the Black Death as it spread across the globe. Asbridge's definitive biography of Yersina pestis, the germ that caused the world’s deadliest disease, is a masterpiece
Thomas W. Laqueur
Compelling, horrifying, humane. This is the history we need now of this cataclysmic pandemic: wide-ranging, personal and hugely accessible. From Kilkenny to Cairo, Moscow to Mecca, Asbridge allows us to see the Black Death through the eyes and in the words of the people all around the world who experienced its terrors, sought to make sense of it, and lived with all its seismic and durable consequences . . . A must-read for anyone who wants to get under the skin and into the mindset of the Middle Ages, or who needs to know how humans react when faced with apocalypse
Seb Falk
Tom Asbridge does for the Black Death what John Keegan did for battle: evoking the feeling of being there, recapturing the experience of the sufferers and survivors. Admiring the flawless scholarship, in language that is lucid, vivid, uncluttered with theory and uninfected by jargon, I’d be tempted – if it weren’t too paradoxical – to say that he makes plague a pleasure
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
This is a rich, multifaceted history that finally makes sense of the research that has shifted our picture of the Black Death so much over the last twenty years. Asbridge’s account of how the Black Death was finally identified reads like a detective novel. Truly mind-opening history, on a global scale, that makes you rethink what you thought you knew.
Lyndal Roper
The Black Death makes two big claims, and amply proves both of them. Mr Asbridge, a historian of the Crusades, shows that the plague affected the Islamic world at least as profoundly as Christian Europe... Mr Asbridge’s second claim is subtler. Although medieval and early modern people harboured theories about the plague that strike modern readers as ignorant, they tried their best, he argues. The authorities made broadly sensible decisions. Physicians risked and often lost their lives treating plague victims. That their treatments were rarely effective does not diminish their bravery
Economist
Breathtaking... The scale of Asbridge’s opus is impressive: previous studies of the Black Death charted specific regions. He tracks the disease over centuries through Europe, Byzantium, South East Asia, Russia, the Near and Far East... His account of the hunt for the pathogen causing the Black Death reads like a biological thriller
The Tablet
This ambitious book tracks the pandemic’s global spread, specifically in areas like the Near and Middle East, Byzantium, North Africa, and Asia... With a focus on the human element, the author not only illustrates the terror and upheaval of this terrible time but also looks at the lives of those who lived through the Black Death, from royalty to the working class... Asbridge’s exceptional research ultimately reveals humanity’s capacity for empathy and survival
Blackwell's, The Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Author Thomas Asbridge
Narrator Justin Avoth, Thomas Asbridge
Duration 19 hours and 2 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781837311859
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre European history: medieval period, middle ages, General and world history, Globalization, History: plagues, diseases etc
Availability AU, GB, IE

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