Seeking a relaxing read during this celebration of the great indoors? I’ve compiled a few of my favorite pandemic-related books. Check out the included Goodreads links for more info and take the opportunity to order from an indie bookshop!
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague – Geraldine Brooks
Some of the most beautiful ugly writing you’ll encounter, in this fictionalized first-person account of one young mother’s year in an English town that’s quarantined itself from the surrounding country during the Great Plague of 1665-66. Fair warning–points off for an absolutely out of left field coda.
The first in Willis’ must-read collection of Oxford-based time travel novels, an engrossingly devastating story that uses the naturalistic sci-fi framework to ask questions of accountability and inevitability in the Black Death of 1348.
Wickett’s Remedy – Myla Goldberg
Set during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and as initially distressing as that implies.
The Speckled Monster – Jennifer Lee Carrell
A hybrid of non-fiction history and narrative, this work takes some liberties with detail but presents an in-depth consideration of a few lesser-known parties in London and Boston who made the first major strides to combat smallpox.
In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made – Norman F. Cantor
Pandemics have a way of reshaping the world that battles them; for Western Europe, as Cantor outlines, the fallout of the Black Death also forced along concepts like workers’ rights, technological innovation, and religious freedom.
Eerie, foreboding, and superior to The Stranger. Don’t make me talk about The Stranger.
BONUS! For the aurally inclined, enjoy some socially distant tunes while you peruse: