Journal of the Plague Year is actually a fictionalized novel but one written very soon after the actual events so it seems very true to life. I found it a great antidote to the tiresome zombie apocalypses plots that infest our tv screens.

Large swathes of London were dying in horrible ways, nobody knew why, and efforts to contain the plague often seemed to make things worse. People fled the cities (which worked, sometimes) but I found it heartening that people didn't immediately form the sort of murderous, paranoid, isolationist mobs that film and tv would have you believe.