The Black Death killed somewhere between a third and half of Europe in the space of a few years. That scale is hard to picture, which is why the right book matters more than a dry timeline.
If you want the hard history, John Kelly's The Great Mortality walks you through the plague's spread city by city, with the kind of detail that makes 1348 feel close. For a wider lens, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror uses the fourteenth century to show how a whole society reacts when death becomes ordinary.
Fiction does something history can't. Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders puts you inside a single English village that quarantines itself, and you feel the cost of that choice on every page.
A few things to look for when you pick a Black Death book: does it explain how the plague actually moved (fleas, rats, trade routes), does it cover the social fallout (labor shortages, pogroms, the cracks in the Church), and does it avoid turning medieval people into cartoons?
If you want a starting point sorted by what you're after, nonfiction depth or a story you can sink into, Skriuwer has a full ranked list here.
Pick one, and the year 1348 stops being a statistic.
