Young adult readers likely know John Green for his teen romance “The Fault in Our Stars,” which deals a heart-tugging story about love amid terminal cancer.
But in the 12 years since its publication, the author has pivoted to writing — and educating — about a number of other conditions.
Most recently, he has turned his attention to tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease.
From countless TikToks about the topic and a full-length introductory lecture on TB to successful internet campaigns lobbying pharmaceutical companies to make TB testing and treatment more accessible, the fluffy-haired writer has become the spokesperson for TB.
Green had previously alluded to the fact that he was writing a nonfiction book about the disease (following his last young adult novel that grapples with obsessive-compulsive disorder, “Turtles All The Way Down”), but it was officially announced Tuesday morning.
Green’s newest book — and second work of nonfiction — “Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” will be published this spring.
Publisher Crash Course Books, a new imprint of Penguin Young Readers, said the book will detail the experiences of a young TB patient named Henry, who Green met in 2019 when traveling with Partners in Health, a global nonprofit Green and his brother, Hank, have long supported.
In the years since that visit, Green amplified his efforts to eradicate TB, a disease that is completely preventable and curable but still claims the lives of over a million people every year.
“This book is the culmination of a long journey toward trying to understand how a disease that has been curable since the 1950s continues to kill over a million people every year,” Green said in a statement.
“I’m thrilled to be publishing it as the first title from Crash Course Books, and so grateful to all the TB researchers and survivors whose generosity with me made it possible for me to tell this story.”
According to a statement, the book will build on Green’s years of activism and education, interweaving Henry’s story with the medical and social history of the disease.
“Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia,” a description for the book reads. “Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.”
Per the book’s description, it aims to be a resource that “humanizes and gives hope” to the “ongoing struggle” to address the disease.
This struggle is one Green knows increasingly well, having worked alongside TB advocates and experts from Doctors Without Borders and Stop TB Partnership, and even speaking before the United Nations on the subject.
He has also personally donated over $1 million to the cause, all while consistently raising awareness about the prevalence and context of TB internationally. This book promises to tie it all together.
“Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, John Green has a gift for bringing truth to storytelling, and storytelling to truth,” Green’s editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, said in a statement.
“Confronting and inspiring, in ‘Everything Is Tuberculosis,’ John distills centuries of history and science through one essential human story.”
Green’s talent to make overwhelming subjects into understandable stories is the capstone of his career as a writer, educator, and creator, Strauss-Gabel said.
She added: “This same craft sits at the heart of the landmark educational media brand Hank and John Green have been building together for more than a decade, guided by the principle that we learn best when we go beyond the facts to truly understand why those facts matter.”
“Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” will be published on March 18, 2025, and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
Header images courtesy of John Green/Crash Course Books
