Description

‘THE STAND is a masterpiece’ (Guardian)

Stephen King’s apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by virus and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.

First came the virus. And then came the dreams . . .

A man escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out over 99 percent of the world’s population within a few weeks.

Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge – Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the ‘dark man’, the apostate of death, the warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil.

Now the survivors must choose between them – and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.

‘A masterpiece’ GUARDIAN
‘His work plumbs, with unnerving accuracy, the hopes and fears of an entire nation’ OBSERVER

Publisher Review

[The Stand] has everything – adventure, romance, prophecy, allegory, satire, fantasy, realism, apocalypse . . . Great! * New York Times Book Review * [The Stand] has everything – adventure, romance, prophecy, allegory, satire, fantasy, realism, apocalypse . . . Great! * New York Times Book Review * A masterpiece . . . King says in the novel’s introduction that he “wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting”, and that’s absolutely what he did . . . The Stand is dense and rich. Every character is full and alive * Guardian * A masterpiece . . . King says in the novel’s introduction that he “wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting”, and that’s absolutely what he did . . . The Stand is dense and rich. Every character is full and alive * Guardian * A fabulous teller of stories who can create an entire new world and make the reader live in it * Express * A fabulous teller of stories who can create an entire new world and make the reader live in it * Express * A writer of excellence…King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel * Sunday Times * ‘King is the greatest popular novelist of our day, comparable to Dickens’. * Toby Litt, Guardian * A writer of excellence…King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel * Sunday Times * ‘King is the greatest popular novelist of our day, comparable to Dickens’. * Toby Litt, Guardian *