Novels

Support a local independent bookstore like City of Asylum Bookstore or The White Whale, including on-line bookshop.  Learn Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist. At the same time, consider this brief NPR story: 'A Matter Of Common Decency': What Literature Can Teach Us About Epidemics, or this 42-minute interview with Stephen King, explaining why reading in the horror genre can help some people manage anxiety.

Grieving Loved Ones Lost To COVID-19, A Writer Turns To Books is an NPR interview with Zibby Owens who hosts the podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. She discusses her October 2020 Washington Post commentary, 15 Books that helped me cope after losing loved ones to COVID-19.

Blindness by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago describes a government’s authoritarian response to a rapidly growing number of people within a city who find themselves unable to see.

The Children’s Hospital by pediatrician Chris Adrian tells of a floating hospital—the only thing to survive an apocalyptic flood of the Earth—and a third-year medical student who finds herself gifted with strange powers of healing.

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano—Though it is about a young boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash, this novel seems apt for those of us trying to negotiate feeling both fortunate and guilty for surviving, while also mourning those who are lost to us during this pandemic.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann explores desire, self-interest, aging, social norms, and falsehoods told by governments to citizens and tourists, and by people to each other and themselves.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel—Mandel’s novel is described by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan as “topical in a way she couldn't have foreseen when she was writing it” with a theme “about how things in life aren't as solid as we might assume.”

A Journal of the Plague Year—Daniel Defoe’s realistic account of the bubonic plague that killed one quarter of London’s population in 18 months 1665–1666.

Inspired by towns that quarantined themselves during the 1918 epidemic, The Last Town on Earth, by Thomas Mullen, is set in the Pacific Northwest mill town of Commonwealth. Originally conceived as a haven for workers weary of exploitation, Commonwealth is threatened by world war, domestic division and mistrust, and a deadly contagion raging across the US. The town votes to quarantine itself, but Commonwealth’s inhabitants find their values as threatened as their health.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is not merely the title that is being parodied for articles about “life or love in the time of COVID-19,” but a beautiful novel by Colombian Nobel prize winner Marquez, set in 1870–1930,  exploring love, aging, and death during wars and outbreaks of cholera. 

Monogamy, by Sue Miller, is recommended by Zibby Owens to read during this pandemic. One of its characters observes: “we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel … consoled …. Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence. … [F]ictional narrative made life seem to matter, … it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.”

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell explores the effect of AIDS in Zambia where “a whole generation of Zambians were wiped out,” and the author lost many of her cousins who were older than she.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is the first novel in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and a work of speculative fiction, a love story set in the world devasted by genetic engineering and overwhelmed by a plague.

Martin Marten by Brian Doyle, published in 2015, demonstrates in beautiful prose how human and nonhuman beings are similar and interconnected. It also reveals how a community is constituted by people who help each other, while respecting each other’s independence and differences. In short, the novel has insights very relevant to these pandemic times, while taking readers away from COVID concerns to life on a mountain, near a river, where martens are fleet-footed in the tree canopy.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, a novel of 1918 Influenza epidemic—recommended by Bridget Keown

The Plague by Albert Camus—recommended by Jason Rosenstock and assigned in Pitt Med’s elective, Pandemic in Medicine and Society

Emma Donoghue  began Pull of the Stars in 2018 on the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic and submitted the finished manuscript two days before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Its title is drawn from the translation of ‘influenza’, and its content depicts the effort of a nurse working in an Irish hospital’s maternity influenza ward as she tries to save the lives of her patients from the 1918 flu that disproportionately affected pregnant women with higher infection and death rates, as well as miscarriages, still births, and children with congenital anomalies.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel—Taking place in the Great Lakes region after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the “Georgia Flu,” has devastated the world and killed most of the population, this novel follows a small troupe of actors and musicians, “The Traveling Symphony,” who have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive.

The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera, a political scientist, who writes novels of crime and corruption in Mexico—This one involves two crime families at war following a plague.

Weather by Jenny Offill—While explicitly addressing climate change, this novel felt very relevant to Emily Wanderer for coronavirus as well.

In What Are You Going Through, published by Sigrid Nunez in September 2020, a woman relates and responds to the stories of the people she encounters during a period of her life both normal and remarkable. She stays with a friend who plans her own death, beating cancer to the punch; she portrays the argument of an academic speaker who has a rigorously accurate and uniformly negative view of the future of the planet and its inhabitants. Both threads, and the normal life surrounding them, seem quite comforting during the pandemic.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, is described as “a tale of fragile hope pitted against overwhelming disaster” (by a review in the The Guardian). It is based on the historical fact that in 1665 villagers in the Derbyshire town of Eyam, afflicted by the plague, voted to quarantine themselves so as not to spread the disease.

Three novels focus on epidemics and memory:

• In The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, the first sign of infection is that people notice they cast no shadow, and then they begin to lose their memories
• In Find Me by Laura van den Berg, the infection erases people’s memories and kills memories, but the protagonist is immune and uses the opportunity to enroll in a medical study as a way to craft her identity
• In Severance by Ling Ma, set in a reimagined past in New York at roughly the time of Occupy Wall Street, Shen Fever makes people endlessly repeat old routines unto death, providing a powerful metaphor for the way the past can entrap and burden us. Ma commented that the animating question of the novel is “why does the China-born protagonist Candace Chen keep working at her job?”