The Last Town on Earth / Thomas Mullen / 394 pages / Twentieth Century Historical Fiction Challenge

This is a sad story of an independent logging town, Commonwealth, Washington.  It was a town cut off from the world and the big business/anti-union/company town/logging interests.  When the Spanish Flu breaks out amongst the soldiers billeted to fight World War I, the town institutes a reverse quarantine to keep the deadly flu out of their town.  While young Phillip, adopted son of the town's founder, and Graham, an independent-minded risk-taker, are on guard duty one night, a soldier challenges the blockade surrounding the town and is killed by Graham.  The town elders bury the body and hope for the best.  Phillip cannot stop thinking that shooting the soldier was wrong.  When yet another soldier shows up, Phillip cannot shoot him and endangers the entire town by allowing him to live.  The soldier and Phillip are quarantined.  Is the soldier a spy?  The flu, which killed five times more civilians in the U.S. than U.S. soldiers were killed in the war, found the town and killed mainly young, healthy adults.  A nearby town takes the law into its own hands and arrests young men of the town who had failed to resister for the draft.  This is a well-told tale of the devastation of war on the home front, conscientious objectors and their plight in World War I, the wicked influenza epidemic of 1918, and the ambiguity, complexity, and challenges of morality.