Lewis, the author of nonfiction bestsellers like “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” is known for persuading compelling narratives of complex and mind-numbing subjects – mortgage-backed securities, sovereign debt, statistics, the dull but essential, government bureaucracy mechanics. His previous books collectively sold more than 10 million copies.
With “A Premonição”, he addresses a subject that is still under development. He addressed the pandemic from what he describes as an under-explored point of view: the ground-level view of the people who led “a kind of secret shadow response” to the pandemic, while senior government officials falsely assured the public that the coronavirus would disappear.
“The Premonition” will join a growing body of nonfiction that explores the pandemic and its impact. Recent and future books include Grace Blakeley’s “The Corona Crash,” which examines how the pandemic will reshape capitalism; New York Times reporter Sheri Fink “emerges” on the ethical, social and scientific dimensions of the crisis; Gabriel Sherman’s “Fever City” on New York City’s response to the spread of the virus, and “Preventable”, a book about the errors that led to the unnecessary deaths and cases of Andy Slavitt’s Covid-19, now a senior advisor to the president Covid Biden Response Team. In June, New York writer Lawrence Wright will release “The Plague Year”, which chronicles the origins of the coronavirus and its global spread.
Lewis started reporting on the pandemic last spring and started writing in the fall. When he called his longtime Norton editor, Starling Lawrence, to tell him what he was working on, he was so excited that he started babbling and couldn’t describe the plot.
“At one point he said, ‘Oh, hell, I can’t explain, I better just go and write’, and I said, ‘It sounds like a wonderful idea,'” said Lawrence.
Lewis hoped to launch the book as soon as possible, in time for Biden’s transition team to read it. “I thought it would be more useful as soon as it was done,” he said.
At the same time, he felt he needed to wait and report on the effectiveness of the government’s response to the pandemic, which proved to be as disastrous as he feared, with tens of millions of Americans infected and hundreds of thousands of deaths.