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The Pandemic Arrives on Book Shelves with These New Releases
Not normal, new normal, super-spreading, and socially distant. Yup, it's been a couple years of COVID and pandemic-centric stories are already starting to publish.
We've seen some unintended COVID fiction that was eerily prescient about this time–think Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind and The End of October. But this roundup of eight books are among the first specifically set during this epidemic event.
Literary heavyweights including Pulitzer-prize winner Louise Erdich, millennial superstar Sally Rooney and the beloved Jodi Picoult are already out with fresh fiction along this time line.
If you're interested in a literal look, check out the non-fiction Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy for deeper dive on what happened in a matter of weeks and where we're headed.
Be sure to add the books that pique your interest to your Want to Read shelf!
Fiction
Our Country Friends has a cast of characters as disparate as a modern-day, pandemic-bound Gilligan's Island–complete with a movie star, app developer, essayist, and Russian novelist. Set in a pod, in the country, and among friends, romance, betrayal, and six months in quarantine adds to the equation in this improbable mix.
A new relationship. A global pandemic. A complete lockdown inside an artist's studio, called Burntcoat. What could possibly go wrong? Art and ambition meet mortality and connection in this new novel by celebrated short-story writer Sarah Hall.
Jodi Picoult wrote her COVID story furiously over four months. Wish You Were Here tackles dementia, mother-daughter relationships, survival instincts, and so much more during the early days of the pandemic. It's a journey that goes from ground zero in a New York City ER to literally being trapped in paradise.
Read our interview with Picoult here.
Read our interview with Picoult here.
It's a mystery and a history and a reckoning that all happens in a book store in Minneapolis, book-ended by All Souls' Day 2019 and 2020. Pulitzer-prize winner Louise Erdrich postures our pandemic times as a modern-day ghost story, where we must answer what we owe to the living, the dead, and to readers.
The latest by the Dublin-based bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends ends just as COVID is beginning. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are four friends that hook up, break up, get back together, and wonder what it all means before life catches up and the pandemic closes in.
Nonfiction
A 13-year-old girl, a public-health officer, and a clandestine team of doctors who call themselves the Wolverines all figure into this thriller of a true story that pits truth and visionaries against bad science and lies in the early days of the pandemic.
The Pulitzer-prize winning author or The Looming Tower is back with a 360-degree look at the time of COVID. Wright tackles the virus's nascent beginnings in China, takes us inside the CDC, unpacks misinformation, and constructs fascinating historic parallels.
Adam Tooze tell the story of a shutdown and the economic impacts that follow, from the first inklings of the virus in China to a full-fledged free fall of the markets. Shutdown retells this spiraling time and what's to come.
Have a good book recommendation that reflects our particular time line? Let's talk books in the comments!
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A Mystery Master's Favorite Whodunits of 2021
Check out more recent articles:
A Debut Novelist's 2021 Reading in Review
Snowed In! Mysteries and Thrillers for the Wicked Cold
A Mystery Master's Favorite Whodunits of 2021
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Dec 22, 2021 01:59AM
This pandemic has given authors new inspiration for their writing.
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I somehow want to read „Wish you were here“, but also I‘ve got enough of the pandemic...
I can't wait to read The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I love her writing.
loved "wish you were here" but also brought up a lot of emotions i wasn't ready to deal with just yet from the early days of this pandemonium....
I know this isn't meant to be a complete list, but Zadie Smith's Intimations was actually one of the first literary works to chronicle the pandemic. I loved Beautiful World, Where Are You? but I personally don't see it as a pandemic novel as it was very briefly (though powerfully) touched on when compared to other novels that did or did not make this list.
Thank you for the list, at least now I know what books I'll avoid. I am fed up with this pandemic around me in a RL to want to spend even a minute of my spare time with it. Just NO.
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard could be added to the list.
Ugh no one wants to read about the pandemic after living through it for what…2 years now? And to top it off, now cases are increasing again? Books are an escape…reading about Covid and the pandemic would be a living hell right now. But that’s just my feelings.Lol
Eh I thought the pandemic element in Beautiful World was really lazily tacked on-but that whole ending seemed like a rush job tbh
I personally think they until the pandemic is over we shouldn't write books set during it.
