Wow what a Book , This book is so close to what is going on at the moment with the covid 19 pandemic we are going through I got goosebumps reading this book especially how close to home this book is.

I would recommend everyone read this amazing book.

I would give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to Netgalley & Harper Fiction for sending me the arc of this book in exchange for this honest review.

The year is 2025. Doctors in Glasgow see the first patients with flu like symptoms which is the start of a deadly global pandemic, much worse than what we are currently experiencing. This illness only kills men and has an extremely high mortality rate. The story is told from many different perspectives, and although I can appreciate that it is very well written, I have to say that I did not enjoy reading it. Let's hope we never have to live through anything so lethal and world changing. Thanks to NetGalley for a preview copy.
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Wow! What a great book, I so enjoyed it. The premise is that a virus sweeps around the world, killing over 90% of all males but sparing all women. It felt very odd to be reading this in 2020, as we are reeling from the onslought of Corona virus, which is not at all as discriminating as the Male Plague. I was not sure how the book would work, as it was written just before the pandemic. It was interesting to read how the author made the characters cope, trying to spare their loved ones by social distancing and masks - just as we do as a norm now.

The story follows a series of people, showing how the pandemic started (a scary prospect with parallels to the rumour-mill for Covid-19), how it spread and how it affected different people. One felt such sadness for some of the woman, and wanted to belt a couple of them (especially Lisa, who I hadn't taken to even before her efforts to grab all the credit for finding a vaccine - a testament to how well the author portrayed her).

I great story, great escapism (if not quite as escapist as the author anticipated when she wrote it!) and I really enjoyed it.

Thank you to NetGalley, HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction and The Borough Press for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A truly amazing debut by this author; a prescient, thought-provoking and emotive tome all in one. While a piece of science fiction but too close to home due to the current Covid-19 climate the lengths that CSB goes to, to create a world where men are removed from the world is startling all the courses of action that will have to be taken by people is staggering.

After a run of a few bad books to cover, this book engaged me and was most enjoyable from beginning to the end to a new beginning

Wow, I was not expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did! Maybe due to the fact, we are literally in an a pandemic, this book was much more impactful, but I think even had covid-19 pandemic not been going on, I would still have been blown away! Completely unputdownable, easy to immerse in, character development and setting completely out of this world, and the plot original, unique, and most important riveting! I would never ever expect it to be writing by a debit author, as it’s too good, but an amazing at how much this debut accomplished! Highly, highly recommend! Prepare for some chills and shocks, especially in today’s world!

Will definitely buzz around and use lower amazon reviewer number on release date!

Utterly engrossing, completely compelling.
Reading this in a pandemic adds a weird layer of reality crossing over with the fiction. This was an utterly compelling read and seeped into my thoughts frequently; and the outcomes (including improved healthcare for women, smaller phones etc) are things we could do without waiting for a male plague to bring about!

Given all that is currently happening in the world I was excited to obtain an ARC of this publication in return for an unbiased review. As a native of Glasgow and the West of Scotland this book further interested me as this was where the plague first emerged.
Told from the perspective of numerous different characters worldwide this was a fascinating read without too much medical explanations and kept my attention throughout.
I'm giving this book four stars rather than five as I felt that it became a little rushed to get to the post plague world. One thing for sure, it'll set you thinking, what if there was a plague that effected only one sex and killed off 90% of that sex ? Guaranteed to set you thinking.

I loved this book! It was enthralling, and I know that the printed version will be even better, as the digital version takes away from the impact. The story is sprawling in the best sense, and I became so much part of the narrative. I can see this being an instant classic, and would highly recommend it to others.

One of the best reads of 2020 so far! Blew me away! Hard to read currently but brilliant writing! Excited to read the next book, excellent debu!

The End of Men is Christina Sweeney-Baird's debut and I found it to be a gripping and shocking read. It is set in 2025 and an outbreak of a virus in Scotland has become a global pandemic which only affects men of whom it kills 90%. The novel follows the accounts of those women caught up in the pandemic from the doctor who witnessed the first case of the virus , a social anthropologist who documents the human experiences , an intelligence analyst and scientists working on the first vaccine. In the current climate Sweeney- Baird's debut feels chillingly possible and I became immediately caught up in the lives of the women involved. It looks at grief and loss and how society changes in the absence of men. It illustrates the strength, determination and resilience of the survivors and I found it to be an ultimately hopeful book. Definitely one of my reads of the year and highly recommended.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC.

I felt a bit disoriented reading a novel that cuts this close to the bone and, lifting my head, would momentarily forget which version of the plague I was living through. ⁣
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This pandemic emerges suddenly in Glasgow with a near fatal mortality rate - but only for men. The book flits between women across the globe from the emergence of the plague to a post-pandemic return to a new normal. Many of these women are central to the handling of the disease, such as a Scottish A&E doctor who handles Patient Zero and whose desperate cries for action are ignored, a young CDC researcher who flies across the Atlantic to join the British Task Force at the epicentre, and a Canadian lesbian virologist who is determined to find a vaccine. Yet it was the more ordinary women whose stories I found more engaging, like the British housewife whose selfish husband leaves her so he can enjoy his last days without the humdrum of domestic boredom, and the Filipina maid working for the Tais who is desperate to flee Singapore as it descends into anarchy. I wish we spent less time with the insufferable anthropologist at UCL, so absorbed by her own grief that she bitterly avoids her best friend who has not experienced tragedy. ⁣
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There is much that echoes reality - the governmental incompetence as ‘the institutions we thought would keep us safe, would in fact be woefully inadequate in the face of a pandemic’, the politicising of a cure, the longing for a return to a pre-pandemic normal. The other part of this thought experiment was more speculative - what would a world where a plague had killed 90% of men look like? Many of these details had, I strongly suspect, been taken directly from Invisible Women - safety features, medicine created for women. Wars where ‘rape is not a tool’ ending the wars waged since the dawn of time where ‘nobody wins when men fight’. It is also a world where plumbers, train drivers and security forces are in short supply, and where women everywhere grieve the death of their husbands and sons. ⁣
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There are many ideas packed into this engrossing book, but perhaps it was most enjoyable because it presents a pandemic so crippling that ours looks rather light.

Incredibly relatable in the current circumstances, brilliantly written and beautifully engaging, I could not put it down until I was finished

A fascinating and fast-paced read, I was glued to this novel. The consequences of a highly infectious and usually fatal pandemic were fascinating to observe - human consequences, emotional, physical, cognitive; as well as consequences for global security, production and supply chain, employment... The list goes on and on and prompts some fascinating chains of thought, as all the best 'what if' novels do.

The numerous parallels between this novel and the current covid crisis are remarkable. I can only imagine how shocked the author must feel about this as the foreword says she wrote it in 2018. Told from multiple viewpoint, the sadness and frustrations of trying to live and work throughout a pandemic resonate on many levels. There were a few aspects which seemed rushed, particularly towards the end but overall this book is a very good read and it may be that the post publication version does not include these issues.

I loved, loved, loved this book. Reading it in the midst of a pandemic made it all the better, I liked seeing what someone imagined a pandemic would be like before we actually found ourselves in one! The subject of a virus which only kills men was an interesting one, it raises many different subjects such as what would happen to the jobs which are mainly staffed with men, such as plumbers, electricians and the army. I enjoyed following different women and the different viewpoints of everyone. At times it was difficult to read as obviously babies and children were not spared. This was such an interesting read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 enjoyable stars

This is a great book and very relevant given we are living through a pandemic.

I’m sure there will be lots of books coming out with a similar theme so if I was the author I would bring this release forward!

It’s set just a few years in the future and describes a plague that wipes out all men except for a small number of immune ones.

It tells the story from the viewpoints of different characters, which really helps give you a sense of the ways the plague has impacted differently on people.

It’s tragic and heartbreaking at times, with so many deaths from babies to oldies, yet no way to cure.

I like the thought that had gone into what the impact a majority female population would look like, for the economy, society, professionally, and on relationships would be.

Definitely worth reading.

I love a good post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel and Christina Sweeny-Baird has really picked a hot topic by writing about a global pandemic; in this case, one that kills only men and boys. Not all of them, admittedly, but enough to change the world completely. It's a 'near-future setting so there's no need for jet-packs and sci-fi weirdness - pretty much everything that happens is within today's imagination and technology. And perhaps a world of women is more of a Utopia than a Dystopia - I'll let that one sit with you.

The book is oddly calm. It resists the temptation to sensationalise the deaths and delivers death and devastation in a cool and measured way. Similarly, it avoids going down the whole 'society falls apart and everybody ends up eating each other' approach of some of the more excitable writers. In doing both these things, it's oddly and eerily more powerful. We see a society learning to handle grief on an utterly unprecedented scale whilst doing what a world of (mostly) women would almost certainly do - get on with sorting stuff out.

The book raises lots of issues about how to recreate a world when everything has changed but almost everything is still possible. When your airline pilots and binmen are mostly men, somebody's going to have to step up and take over. You might not need to fly all over the world, but somebody's got to empty the bins.

It doesn't go the whole hog of eliminating ALL men, but certainly plenty enough to trigger a lot of interesting changes. I particularly enjoyed (not sure that's the right word) the immune man getting fed up with women randomly hitting on him whenever he was out without his wife. Gents, let's face it, if there aren't enough of you to go around, some people aren't really after you; they're after your sperm. I could also relate to the 'baby lottery' scandal that turns up towards the end. If you have a limited supply of sperm, society WOULD most likely be selective about who got it. The book doesn't touch on what the problem will be 20 years later when all the world's children come from a relatively restricted gene pool. How would they ensure half-siblings don't accidentally have further children together?

The book is set in 5 years time and it has a degree of believability that it probably wouldn't have had a year ago. It introduces a lot of characters - arguably, a few too many as we don't really get the chance to know some of them very well. It hops about all over the world. I did struggle at times to remember who was who and where they were, and I couldn't really grasp onto a 'lead' character (although, potentially, the writer Christine seems to pull it all together at the end. I enjoyed the ruthless and not so ruthless scientists striving tirelessly for a vaccine, some driven by altruism and others by fame and fortune.

I've read two other books or series in the past year that also predicted worlds without men. This is the best by a very major distance. It's a grown-up book about a grown-up issue and it's also very entertaining, thought provoking and well-written. I recommend it highly and I hope the publishers will consider bringing forward the publication date as it has a lot to say about the problems we find ourselves in today. I've been very privileged to receive a review copy and I'm sure this one is going to be very popular.

It is impossible to read this book without making comparisons to the world in which we currently live, and yet, The End of Men describes such a different world. Though similarly affected by a pandemic, this is not the story of covid-19, but rather the story of women, and how we would cope with the end of men. And so, in its simplest form, this is a feminist story, which touches on so many aspects. How much safer women may feel, how iPhones could decrease in size, how the LGBT community might be affected. This last in particular was handled extremely well, and I am glad the author included it.

Coupled with the obvious grief that so many would feel at the loss of their fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, friends, and the guilt that the women felt at carrying the virus, The End of Men is a fiercely emotional story, with the underlying theme that women will just carry on, as we have always done, during pandemics and wars and the like.

One minor irritation, which will no doubt only annoy that 1% of people who suffer from coeliac disease, was the mention of a lack of suitable gluten free food. I thought this could be a good opportunity to raise awareness of coeliac disease, and how difficult it can be to live with. When the panic buying started early this year, the gluten free aisle too was raided when the regular items such as bread and pasta went out of stock, despite GF food costing 3x as much and rarely tasting as good. It would have been great if the author could have shown the reality of this.

As soon as I read the blurb for this book, I knew I had to read it! The blurb immediately made me think of VOX, and Q both by Christina Dalcher and I totally admit to loving those dystopian, futuristic sometimes almost prophetic books. I find the cover quite stark and striking which fits the books content very well. I think it will certainly stick out on a book store shelf. The byline of “Only Men Carry The Virus. Only Women Can Save Us All.” on the book has given me mixed feelings as if being 100% nit-picky here (but I find I am more nit-picky with books I really enjoy). The part of the byline that says Only Men Carry The Virus . . Mmm …after reading the book my understanding is that women can “carry the virus” whilst showing no symptoms and therefore spread the virus. However, it is only men that die from the virus. However, when you search the definition of “virus carrier” it explains the terminologies meaning, A carrier is an individual who carries and is capable of passing on a genetic mutation associated with a disease and may or may not display disease
symptoms. Carriers are associated with diseases inherited as recessive traits. I guess what I am trying to say/explain is that once you have really read the book you understand that the byline is technically correct. Basically, all you need to know is only men get the virus and die! Women Can “carry” the virus and pass it to men but cannot die from it themselves.

This book is going to be so difficult to review as I don’t want to give away spoiler-esque aspects of the individual characters. I think sometimes the more you enjoy a book the harder it is to review it! This is one of those books! As soon as I started reading, I felt hooked and hated having to put it down. I couldn’t wait to find out how the different characters lives changed, who had happy endings or had to rebuild their lives as best they could.

The virus begins in the year 2025 in Scotland with Dr Amanda Maclean an experienced Doctor realising something is really very, very wrong. Dr Amanda does a little research to learn what all her male patients have in common. Then she really does try to warn those higher up in power as soon as she can, unfortunately for her and the rest of the world they ignore her, even labelling her as a “hysterical woman”, words that come back to haunt those who used them!

The virus is both simple, yet complicated. It kills only men, but women can be carriers. For the first couple of days of having the virus, the male does not seem ill, meaning they continue as normal, kissing their family & friends which in turn passes the virus to them. Every time the man coughs, sneezes, simply wipes his nose he is leaving the virus on surfaces for others to touch and pick up spreading the virus far and wide. The actual symptoms begin on the third day, and death occurs usually by the fifth day. Though women do not die from this virus, quickly named “the plague” in the book they are carriers.

The thing that seriously disrupts the world and how it works is that the virus kills men…..I guess the first people will think about is How will the population go on? Then you have to think, what about all the jobs done pre-dominantly by males? Those in power in the governments in this book do refer back to the War quite a few times to find and come up with solutions to the gaps left in the workforce. Of course, the answer (like during the war) is that women will do these jobs! But the problem there, is the women either may not want to do some of those jobs or may need to study to be able to do the jobs.

Many men just decide to isolate themselves, meaning they stay home with the children and the women rapidly become the providers, the ones that have to go out into the world to surce food and anything else they may need for their families. Some families simply pack up and move to isolated holiday homes to try and wait out the virus. Hopeful a cure, a vaccine, or something will be found to stop the virus.

I enjoyed the fact we got a glimpse of the “normal”, “before” life of one of the characters too. The biggest worry that Catherine had was, should she dress up for Halloween to take her little boy Theodore trick or treating! Catherine’s parents died years before and she had no siblings. Her life is her family, her husband Anthony and their gorgeous sone Theodore. Catherine has suffered more loss in her life than some, sadly having problems conceiving too. Her husband wants them to book in for IVF now but there is something just holding Catherine back, she wants to wait a little longer and see if nature will work instead. As soon as the news starts reporting on “The Plague” it is the only thing anyone seems to be talking about. Beatrice, is a mother who is picking her child up from nursery at the same time as Catherine. Beatrice has a country home in Norfolk, she and her family are going to get out of the City of London before things get any worse. They have money they can afford to take the time off work. Beatrice continues saying she has a husband, three sons, two brothers and her only remaining parent, her father to think about too. Unfortunately for Catherine, she and her husband cannot afford to flee London. They have to do the best they can where they already live and work.

Another character Dr Amanda Maclean is trying to do her best both at work and at home. Amanda has to deal with the possibilities of the plague both in her work and home life. Amanda is married to Will and they have two sons. You can feel Amanda’s frustration that despite contacting those higher up in Public Health regarding the plague she is being ignored and is literally going into work everyday not knowing how many Dr’s will be there to work with her and how many of her colleagues will have been claimed by the virus overnight.
When Amanda decides to put her family first, she leaves work and its problems behind and goes home. Amanda takes every possible precaution she can think of! She burns the clothes she had on at work and sleeps in her garage in an effort to prevent herself somehow carrying the awful disease to her family. After a week or so of these precautions Amanda feels it should be safe for her to be around her husband and sons. However, her husband doesn’t seem to understand the magnitude and reality of the plague. Will sneaks into work whilst Amanda is asleep! Will is also a consultant and has gone to the paediatric oncology department, as the mother of a patient has called him, begging for treatment for her child. Amanda is furious, doesn’t he realise the risks he is taking with their son’s lives? Amanda makes Will stay in the garage away from her and her sons, and they wait to see if and when it may be safe to allow him into the house again. Naturally Will apologises, almost as if he made a small mistake, he attempts to explain why he felt he had to go into work for his young patient. Amanda does not accept his apology, there was no mistake. Will had to know what he was doing. In fact, Amanda admits to herself if anything happens to her boys she will never forgive Will. Will is confined to the garage, no contact with the boys or even Amanda, as he could pass the plague to her and then she could unknowingly pass it to their sons.
Amanda remains a pivotal person in the plague and news around it as she ends up writing to newspapers and even finds out the details of “patient zero” and how the virus was brought into the country.

The book has characters based all around the world, Canada, Moscow, Singapore, and China as well as the UK. It was quite fascinating reading of the different ways the different UK regions and countries in the world coped with the plague. One country strongly encourages pregnant women to go to hospital to have planned births and then removes male children from their mothers and keeps them isolated from everyone else. The mothers are allowed to see and interact with their own child but must wear a hazmat suit. A region in the UK gathers a group of teenage boys and send them to a remote hostel to be cared for their in the hope they will not catch the virus. Different countries and people really do take extra ordinary precautions and go to great lengths to try to prevent the spread of the plague and their races men from dying out.
Despite the book being quite serious it does have some moments of humour. For example, when Amanda orders Will to scream at the boys like they are about to touch a burning hob if they attempt to go near him!

My immediate thoughts upon finishing the book were I enjoyed the book a lot.....but....it's difficult to describe exactly what I mean....certain parts felt too busy, flitting to different people. Perhaps the amount of characters we followed throughout the plague could have been cut back a little. At times it became hard to remember who was who, along with whereabouts we were in the timeline of the plague. On the whole I do have to say I loved it though!

To sum up, it was both weird but addictive to be reading this book during the current situation with corona virus. Prior to coronavirus you may have read this book and thought it really far- fetched, but there’s a gasp, shock, horror moment whilst reading this book that you pause and think this really could happen. I found the book both powerful and thought provoking. It’s content stays with you long after you have finished reading the last page.

This was a very gripping read. Set in Glasgow in the future a dr has to treat a patient with flu-like symptoms but within hours he is dead. Reading this in 2020 during the Covid 19 pandemic this story felt so familiar. Just like Covid the virus spread fast and the only difference was the victims in this book were all men.
When you read a book that is so shocking but rings so true with the world around you at the same time it’s very scary.
Let’s hope we find a cure for Covid 19 so we really don’t completely reflect this book.
Definitely one to read right now!!