Novels set during the height of COVID-19 fail to tell the full story of that era of mass death and despair.

A collage of contemporary book covers arranged in a repeating grid. Titles include Down Time by Andrew Martin, a white book with rectangular images of sunshine and rain clouds on the cover; The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markowitz, which has a small yellow car travling across a desert on the cover; and Sacrament by Susan Straight, which features an abstract blur of blue and green above a photograph of a camper van.

Ever since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve been eager to read novels that explore what COVID was, and continues to be like. At the time, writers joked incessantly about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during an episode of plague in Renaissance England. How would we all use our time? Would we be writing masterpieces? Would the COVID pandemic generate a new, thrilling era of artistic production? Would everyone be writing a pandemic novel?

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