 The book is about a medical doctor in a quarantined city in Northern Europe, and there's a plague ravaging the city at a very, very high infection fatality rate. Nobody knows how to treat it. And a lot of the beginning of the book is the doctor having a conversation in his own head. Should I go out of my apartment? Because if I do, I'm probably going to die. I'm not going to be able to help anybody anyway. So isn't it just the most prudent thing to lock myself in here and wait this out?