I found it so easy to get lost in this meandering fever dream of epic dystopian proportions.

I really enjoy this kind of storytelling which I feel is reminiscent of Cloud Cuckoo Land and the Night Circus, but this is very much a reflective "what if the world unraveled around you" kind of a story with very different themes than the other two books. It might be a weird comparison but in the case of all 3 books I feel you're a bit caught up in a fever dream where you piece together the story across multiple times, persons and places, with there being common threads through it all and a general feeling of hope.

That being said this is very much the dystopian/world-is-ending type of speculative fiction that feels all too close, perhaps even more so now than at its original publication 10 years ago. In this story, a pandemic takes the world by storm. Our tale follows several different characters of various ages and walks of life. They all have some connection to a specific King Lear production whose lead actor died of a heart attack just before the world followed suit.