Books with category 🦠 Epidemic-Pandemic
Displaying 4 books

Blue Ruin

2024

by Hari Kunzru

From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital's influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.

The Limits

The Limits is a stunning new novel by the best-selling and prize-winning author Nell Freudenberger. Set across the vibrant landscapes of French Polynesia and the bustling intensity of New York City, this novel explores the lives of three characters who experience profound transformations over the span of a single year.

From the tiny volcanic island of Mo'orea, off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist dedicated to preserving the endangered coral reefs sends her teenage daughter Pia to live with her ex-husband in New York. Upon arrival at her father Stephen's luxurious Manhattan apartment, Pia, who is fluent in French and intellectually advanced, meets his new, younger wife, Kate. Pia's life has been a constant shuttle between her parents' contrasting worlds: her father's demanding role as a surgeon in a New York hospital and her mother's urgent efforts against ecological destruction.

As COVID-19 imposes near total isolation, Pia is set on a path of rebellion, while Kate, a New York City schoolteacher, struggles to forge a connection with a teenager whose potential for havoc rivals her privilege. Meanwhile, Kate's sixteen-year-old student Athyna grapples with the weight of caring for her toddler nephew, Marcus, as she tries to complete her senior year online.

As Athyna's fears of the outside world grow, a crisis at home drives her to the brink of desperation. The lives of Pia and Athyna converge, leading them down parallel yet fundamentally different paths of tragedy.

The Limits is an emotionally charged narrative that delves into themes of nation, race, class, and family. It is a heart-wrenching and humane portrait of contemporary life, reflecting the stark inequalities of the 21st century and the enduring impact of colonial history.

Fourteen Days

2024

by Margaret Atwood

Fourteen Days unfolds in a Lower East Side tenement during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdowns, offering an unexpected and captivating narrative where each character, belonging to an eclectic and vibrant New York community, is clandestinely penned by a different prominent author. As the lockdown progresses, the residents of a Manhattan apartment complex start to congregate on their rooftop, sharing stories night after night. These gatherings transform strangers into a tight-knit community, each bringing their own seat from chairs to overturned buckets.

The tenants, who had previously exchanged little more than nods, begin to forge genuine bonds. Fourteen Days, reminiscent of Decameron, is a collaborative novel overseen by general editor Margaret Atwood, with contributions from a stellar lineup of writers. It celebrates the unexpected strength and solidarity that emerged from the devastation of the pandemic. This heartwarming anthology stands as a testament to the resilience of communities in the face of adversity.

Contributors include: Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, Celeste Ng, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Diana Gabaldon, Ishmael Reed, Meg Wolitzer, Luis Alberto Urrea, James Shapiro, Sylvia Day, Mary Pope Osborne, Monique Truong, Hampton Sides, R. L. Stine, R. O. Kwon, David Byrne, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman, Rachel Kushner, Candace Bushnell, Nora Roberts, Scott Turow, Tommy Orange, and many more.

The Last Fire Season

2024

by Manjula Martin

H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means—now—to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world.

When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more frequent: each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night.

In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire's role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.

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