Delirium (Lauren Oliver novel)
Delirium is a dystopian young adult novel written by Lauren Oliver, published in January 2011 by HarperCollins (HarperTeen), about a young girl, Lena Haloway, who falls in love in a society where love is seen as a disease.
Plot
The story is set in Portland, Maine, in an alternate present. Civilization is concentrated in those cities which escaped the severe bombings of decades past. Travel between cities is highly restricted. Electric fences separate the city from the Wilds—unregulated territory which was presumably mostly destroyed by bombs.
The totalitarian government teaches that love is a disease, named amor deliria nervosa, commonly referred to as "the deliria". A surgical cure for the deliria has been developed and is mandatory for citizens 18 years old and over. Lena has looked forward to the procedure for years, convinced as she is by the government that love is a horrible disease that must be destroyed from mankind's system.
However, mere months before her scheduled procedure, Lena falls in love with an Invalid (a person over 18 who has not taken the Cure and lives in the Wilds) named Alex. He was born in the Wilds outside the city, and has pretended to be cured in order to live undetected in the city and be in the resistance. He offers Lena the means of escape from the procedure that will destroy her ability to love. The two of them would leave the city and live in the Wilds, joining the rebels who oppose the procedure and the government. Although Lena struggles with the thought of leaving her life behind, she ultimately decides to go just seven days before her procedure.
Alex and Lena are discovered meeting together a few nights before their planned escape. Lena is captured and held in her home, tied down and under guard, until she can have the procedure to cure her of her love sickness—and render her docile and unresistant. Alex rescues her and they attempt to escape the city, but Alex allows himself to be captured and shot on the spot to save Lena. She runs off into the Wilds, not wanting Alex's sacrifice to be in vain.
Delirium

“ Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: it kills you both when you have it and when you don't. ”
Plot
They didn’t understand that once love -- the deliria -- blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the government demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Haloway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy.
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.
Summary
Lena starts off Delirium counting down the days to her cure. Even before the day of her evaluation, Lena works on her interview procedure with her aunt Carol. She enters the interview procedure along side her best friend Hana Tate expecting an average score which would secure her a reasonable match and allow her to proceed onto college.
Upon her first interview, Lena starts to panic because her answers are a little bit out of the ordinary. When asked what her favorite book is, she says Romeo and Juliet and then answers that her favorite color is grey instead of a safe color like blue or yellow and things get tense. Just as everything seems to be going downhill, a stampede of cows interrupts the evaluations as a protest of the cure. This is where Lena gets her first sight of Alex Sheathes, and she thinks he is an Invalid because he laughs at the stampede before disappearing.
While Lena and Hana are out running, they trespass upon the government property, and Alex introduces himself.
Lena sees that Alex has a three pronged scar behind his ear (a sign that he got the cure) and learns that he is nineteen. Alex then persuades Lena to meet up with him on several occasions. The first time Alex hints that he wants to meet her at Back Cove.
She makes it to Back Cove that night, but does not see Alex. When she sees him at a party, they agree to meet up at a beach. When Lena gets there, Alex and she race to the buoys, where Alex confesses who he truly is.
While she is first scared and runs away, Lena and Alex end up seeing each other again after Lena goes to a party to warn Hana about a raid. The party gets raided before Lena can get her out, but Alex saves her from an attack dog and hides with her in a closet where they also share their first kiss after Alex explains that she won't necessarily be happy if she's like everyone else.
The next day, Hana learns about Alex and Lena's relationship, and eventually agrees to cover for Lena whenever she and Alex hang out. The three of them start to hang out in the Deering Highlands, most often in 37_Brooks .
On one occasion, Lena is taken beyond the fence lines of the society and into The Wilds by Alex.
When Lena wanders to 37 Brooks after Alex encounters Lena and Brian Scharff holding hands, she tells Alex of her mother, and the pin she always wore. This leaves Alex dumbfounded, saying that Lena's mother, who is believed to have been dead by suicide since Lena was six, might be alive.
The next day, Lena and Alex go to the The Crypts . Alex shows her his father's burial spot, which reveals Alex's real last name, Sheathes, and his last name assigned to him, Warren. In Ward Six, Lena and Alex discover Lena's mother's old cell, because Lena's mother has escaped to the Wilds.
After leaving the Crypts, Lena believes that no one cares about her anymore, not even Alex. Alex refuses to believe this, telling her that her mother gave her up for Lena to be safe; because she loved her. Alex then says he also loves Lena, and Lena reponds by saying, "I love you too." Lena and Alex plan to run away to the Wilds, because Lena cannot imagine a world without love, without loving Alex or Grace or her mother.
When Lena tells Hana about hers and Alex's plans to escape to the Wilds, Hana grows jealous, and tells the regulators about Lena and Alex, because it is stated in Requiem, that she wanted what Lena had with Alex with someone else.
While visiting 37 Brooks that night to give Alex some supplies they will need for the Wilds, the regulators discover her and Alex, and while Alex manages to escape, Lena is arrested.
Lena is then placed under house arrest, and her family give her sleeping pills and tie her to her bed to stop her from escaping. They also move the day of her operation closer so she can get The Cure.
Before her operation, Grace helps Lena to escape by untying her bonds, and Lena then flees from her window to an awaiting Alex below with a motorbike. A chase follows, and, upon reaching the fence, Alex tells Lena to climb and run while he sacrifices himself in the process, though he does not tell Lena this. An explosion follows and it is believed Alex died because the last thing Lena sees is him getting shot.
After, Lena flees into the Wilds and the book ends, when she fully believes in love.
Inspiration
Lauren Oliver says that the inspiration for Delirium came to her one day at the gym. She had recently read a Gabriel Garcia Márquez essay where he said that all books were about either love or death. Since her first book, Before I Fall was about death, she wanted to write a book about love. At the gym she was watching a news report about a pandemic, and the two ideas combined in her head to form the central concept of the Delirium books.[1]
Sequels
Delirium is the first installment of a trilogy. Two midquels between the first and second books, Hana and Annabel, were released on February 28 and December 26, 2012 respectively. The second book, Pandemonium, was released on February 28, 2012. The third and final book in the trilogy, Requiem, was released on March 5, 2013. Another midquel, between the second and third books, Raven, was also released March 5th, 2013. The midquels were made into one book, Delirium Stories subtitled Hana, Annabel, and Raven, released the same date. Another midquel, also between the first and second books, called Alex, was released with the first edition of the final book in the trilogy