World War Z

The American author Max Brooks published the apocalyptic novel World War Z, subtitled An Oral History of the Zombie War, in 2006. It is broken into eight chapters, from Warnings and Blame through The Great Panic and Total War to Good-Byes, and it is made up of individual accounts that a United Nations Postwar Commission agent is said to have gathered. It is a follow-up to Brooks's fictional survival manual, but its tone is more serious.

The frame is a series of interviews conducted by a fictionalised version of the author a decade after the end of what the accounts call the Zombie War. There is no main character: there is a doctor who saw the first case in a Chinese village, officials who drew up the plans that saved some countries and doomed others, soldiers, and survivors who happened to be in the wrong place when the outbreak reached them.

Survivors from very different backgrounds, spread across the world and as far as Antarctica and orbital stations, describe their experiences, and the book follows the economic, social, religious, political and environmental shifts that came after the crisis. The accounts are told in their own voices and describe the same events from positions that do not agree.

Brooks wrote the novel as a documentary rather than a narrative, and the structure means the reader assembles the war from conflicting testimony. It is a standalone book, and the plot covers the collapse, the long recovery and the decisions that shaped both.