From the bestselling author ofEverything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson'sThe Ghost Mapvividly recreates Victorian London to show how huge populations live together, how cities can kill - and how they can save us.

Steven Johnson is one of today's most exciting writers about popular culture, urban living and new technology. InThe Ghost Maphe tells the story of the terrifying cholera epidemic that engulfed London in 1854, and the two unlikely heroes - anesthetist Doctor John Snow and affable clergyman Reverend Henry Whitehead - who defeated the disease through a combination of local knowledge, scientific research and map-making.

In telling their extraordinary story, Steven Johnson also explores a whole world of ideas and connections, from urban terror to microbes, ecosystems to the Great Stink, cultural phenomena to street life.

'A wonderful book'
  Mail on Sunday

'A thumping page-turner'
  Daily Telegraph

'Enthralling ... vivid and gripping'
  New Statesman

'Exhilarating'
  Spectator

'It is a rattling scientific mystery, but in the hands of Steven Johnson it becomes something much richer ... a vast, interconnected picture about urban and bacterial life ... it is difficult to do justice to the exuberance of Johnson's ideas'
  Scotland on Sunday

Steven Johnsonis the author of the acclaimed booksEverything Bad is Good for You,Mind Wide Open,Where Good Ideas Come From,EmergenceandInterface Culture. His writing appeared in theGuardian, theNewYorker,NationandHarper's, as well as the op-ed pages ofThe New York Timesand theWall Street Journal. He is a Distinguished Writer In Residence at NYU's School Of Journalism, and a Contributing Editor toWired.