Phase Six

"Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts." The New York Times

In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an MD and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greenland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq.

Both a chamber piece of multiple intimate perspectives and a more omniscient glimpse into the megastructures (political, cultural, and biological) that inform such a disaster, the novel reminds us of the crucial bonds that form in the midst of catastrophe, as a child and several hyper-educated adults learn what it means to provide adequate support for those they love. In the process, they celebrate the precious worlds they might lose, and help to shape others that may survive.

“Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts. - The New York Times”

Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts. The New York Times
If you've been waiting for the great novel of the COVID-19 era, it's in your hands. I read Phase Six with a galloping heart. With heroic humor and a poet's ear and eye for what makes humanity worth saving, Shepard's polyphonic novel of contagion and collapse is also the story of love's unlikely survival in the most hostile conditions -- Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Jim Shepard not only writes at the cutting edge of literature, but he IS the cutting edge of literature. He excavates the twin crises of our era-climate change and pathogens-and builds a story that is as poignant as it is true. The writing is stunning. The research is stunning. The after-effect is stunning. Phase Six is a great book for our times: the past, the present and those that-we hope-are yet to come. -- Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
No amount of prior admiration for Jim Shepard's fiction prepared me for the magnificent Phase Six-a book at once so wise and so funny, so bleak and so tender. With astonishing virtuosity, he conveys huge amounts of information in a way that is not only lucid but utterly gripping, and he creates characters who make me want to rush into the novel to save them from the virus and themselves. What a triumph! -- Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field
Imagining catastrophe is, now more than ever, an essential task, and no one does it better than Jim Shepard. At once scary and timely, funny and absorbing, Phase Six is a must-read. -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
Paced like a prophetic thriller . . . Shepard has frequently employed research as a foundation for his literary creations, but never before in such pulse-racing fashion . . . Readers will find themselves in territory that feels eerily familiar-panic, politics, uncertainty, fear, a resistance to quarantine, an overload of media noise-as Shepard's command of tone never lets the tension ease . . . All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the escape. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Phase Six is a fast-paced, suspenseful story about what happens when a different microbe is unleashed on the world . . . [A]n ode to family, friends, lovers, hard work and the beautiful, heartbreaking innocence of childhood Daily Mail
Thrilling . . . a very human story, full of emotion and inevitable sorrow and pain. Irish Indepedent

Jim Shepard is the author of four previous collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which won The Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his short fiction has often been selected for Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. The most recent of his seven novels, The Book of Aron, won the PEN/New England Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Book Prize for Jewish literature, and the Clark Fiction Prize. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Karen Shepard, his three children and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College.

"Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts." The New York Times In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an MD and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greenland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq. Both a chamber piece of multiple intimate perspectives and a more omniscient glimpse into the megastructures (political, cultural, and biological) that inform such a disaster, the novel reminds us of the crucial bonds that form in the midst of catastrophe, as a child and several hyper-educated adults learn what it means to provide adequate support for those they love. In the process, they celebrate the precious worlds they might lose, and help to shape others that may survive.

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