In the autumn of 2021 a wave of novels set during the Covid-19 pandemic reached bookshops. Some readers wanted nothing to do with them; others found it a relief to see the strangeness of lockdown reflected back. A few of the books have lasted.
Four novels from 2021
- Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (November 2021). A group of friends sits out the first months of the pandemic at a house in upstate New York. Comic and melancholy, with echoes of Chekhov, it is about friendship, class and the people who could afford to escape the city.
- The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (November 2021). Set in a Minneapolis bookshop, much like the one Erdrich owns, it moves through 2020: the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, and a haunting. Erdrich's narrator is a former prisoner, which brings the criminal justice system into the story.
- Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult (November 2021). A young art specialist travels to the Galápagos Islands just as the world shuts down. The novel's later turns explore the experience of frontline health workers.
- The Fell by Sarah Moss (2021). A short novel set in England's Peak District during lockdown, about a woman who breaks quarantine to walk in the hills, and the people affected when she does not come home.
What these books do
Novels written close to events cannot have hindsight. Their value is different: they record textures that official histories miss, such as boredom, fear, small kindnesses and resentment, and the way the pandemic fell unequally on different people. Several of the 2021 novels are as much about inequality and justice as about the virus.
Why it matters here
Public inquiries into the pandemic's handling began in several countries, including the UK's Covid-19 Inquiry, launched in 2022. Inquiries establish facts about decisions; fiction preserves what those decisions felt like for the people living through them. Both are forms of memory, a theme that runs through our Legacy & the Troubles section.