The novel is broken into eight chapters: “Warnings”, “Blame”, “The Great Panic”, “Turning the Tide”, “Home Front USA”, “Around the World, and Above”, “Total War”, and “Good-Byes”, and features a collection of individual accounts told to and recorded by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague.

Its 2007 audiobook version, performed by a full cast including Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, and John Turturro, won an Audie Award.

An agent for the United Nations Postwar Commission, Brooks travels the world a decade after the end of what is most commonly referred to as the "Zombie War".

The pandemic begins twenty years previously in the early 21st century, with the infection of a boy in a village in Dachang, China; the release of the virus, referred to as "Solanum" in The Zombie Survival Guide, is implied to have been unearthed by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

The United States, in particular, is overconfident and distracted by an upcoming election, responding only by deploying small special operations teams to temporarily contain isolated outbreaks.

The following spring, an unnamed journalist reveals the uselessness of Phalanx and the true nature of Solanum, sparking a crisis later dubbed the "Great Panic" in which global order collapses, with rioting, breakdown of essential services, and indiscriminate culling of citizens killing more people than the zombies themselves.

Paul Redeker, a former intelligence consultant for the apartheid-era South African government, develops a drastic survival strategy that designates large groups of humans as unwitting bait, distracting the undead to give safe zones time to fortify themselves and build up resources; most countries go on to adopt the controversial plan.

The International Space Station remains crewed by three astronauts who volunteer to not return to Earth; its commander observes miles-wide "mega swarms" of zombies stretching across Central Asia and the Great Plains.

Knowing that zombies freeze solid in extreme cold, many ill-prepared North American civilians flee into the wilderness of northern Canada, where in an estimated eleven million people die of disease, hypothermia, starvation, and cannibalism.

Other countries begin joining the Americans in their fight, with the United Kingdom constructing fortified, elevated motorways throughout Great Britain to enable easier travel while the hordes of undead are being cleared.

Tens of millions of zombies remain active, mainly on the ocean floor, mountains above the snow line, and the Arctic; the United Nations fields a large force to eliminate them.

Following a religious revolution sparked by rampant suicide within the Russian army during the war, Russia has become an expansionist theonomy intent on annexing the former Soviet republics and has adopted a repopulation program under which the nation's few remaining fertile women are used as state broodmares.

Several new, unnamed countries have emerged due to wartime governments expelling convicts into infested zones, with many of these criminals surviving and going on to establish their own independent "fiefdoms".

Fossil fuels are scarce, with petroleum from the Middle East becoming practically nonexistent after Saudi Arabia destroyed its oil reserves for unknown reasons during the war; sailboats have returned as the most common nautical vessels.

"[1] Brooks acknowledged making several references to popular culture in the novel, including one to the alien robot franchise Transformers, but declined to identify the others so that readers could discover them independently.

[3][4] At one point in the book, a Palestinian refugee living in Kuwait City refuses to believe the dead are rising, fearing it is a trick by the Israeli government.

Many American characters blame the United States' inability to counter the zombie threat on low confidence in their government and a general exhaustion over conflict due to recent "brushfire wars.

The client populates his mansion with other wealthy celebrities and their armies of personal assistants, and installs cameras in each room to broadcast a live feed of their amenities to the rest of the world.

[8] Throughout the novel, characters demonstrate the physical and mental requirements needed to survive a disaster—a soldier in the U.S. Army describes a condition he terms "Z-Shock" that causes people to suffer potentially deadly psychological episodes induced by the extreme stress of battling the undead.

On the American homefront, a former Hollywood director creates propaganda films designed to inspire hope in the civilian populace, who are being afflicted by a mysterious, stress-related condition known as "Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome" that causes thousands to die in their sleep.

[3] Patrick Daily of the Chicago Reader said the novel transcends the "silliness" of The Zombie Survival Guide by "touching on deeper, more somber aspects of the human condition.

"[4] Drew Taylor of the Fairfield County Weekly credited World War Z with making zombies more popular in mainstream society.

[19] Random House published an abridged audiobook (5 hours 59 minutes) in 2007, directed by John McElroy and produced by Dan Zitt, with sound editing by Charles De Montebello.

* The Complete Edition[21] In her review of the audiobook for Strange Horizons, Siobhan Carroll called the story "gripping" and found the listening experience evocative of Orson Welles's famous radio narration of The War of the Worlds, broadcast October 30, 1938.

Carroll had mixed opinions on the voice acting, commending it as "solid and understated, mercifully free of 'special effects' and 'scenery chewing' overall", but lamenting what she perceived as undue cheeriness on the part of Max Brooks and inauthenticity in Steve Park's Chinese accent.

[5] Publishers Weekly also criticized Brooks's narration, but found that the rest of the "all-star cast deliver their parts with such fervor and intensity that listeners cannot help but empathize with these characters".

[24][25] In June 2006, Paramount Studios secured the film rights for World War Z for Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment, to produce.

[26] The screenplay was written by J. Michael Straczynski, with Marc Forster directing and Pitt starring as the main character, UN employee Gerry Lane.