By Collection Management Librarian Dontaná
From the plague to the 1918 influenza to now, pandemics have been unwelcome members of society. Touching everyone and everything, global sickness and the changes we have to make to get through makes us anxious and sends us looking for an escape.
No wonder we turn to fiction that explores pandemics and society’s response. While you won’t find The Walking Dead on this list, you will find novels and short stories that explore the COVID-19 pandemic and its lingering health effects, and other pandemics, real and fictional.
Want more? Check out our suggestions from 2020 and 2022.
Pandemic novels & short stories
Fourteen Days: A Literary Project of the Authors Guild of America
Why you should try it: The early days of the pandemic were a confusing rush of information. But as much as it separated us, it also highlighted the importance of community, which is the central part of this collaborative novel.
Description: One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbors gather, bringing chairs, milk crates, and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants—some of whom have barely spoken to each other—become real neighbors. In this Decameron-like serial novel, a star-studded list of contributors, including general editor Margaret Atwood and Authors Guild president Douglas Preston, create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn’t get away from the city when the pandemic hit.
Delphi by Clare Pollard
Why you should try it: Dark academia + tarot + uninterrupted family time = a meditation on uncertainty and the inability to look away.
Description: A classics academic immersed in her studies of ancient prophecies becomes obsessed with predicting the future through chiromancy, zoomancy, and oenomancy after the COVID-19 lockdown magnifies her imploding marriage and increasingly unreachable young son.
There's Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg
Why you should try it: To our knowledge, this is the first novel featuring a character with long COVID, the current name for the debilitating mix of symptoms now recognized as a disability.
Description: A woman with a mysterious illness who occasionally finds herself in "The Pit"—a delirious state of semi-consciousness—and the improbable, sometimes-imagined people who meet her there.
The Sleepless by Victor Manibo
Why you should try it: What would you do with your time if you never had to sleep again? Get another job? Maybe, but 24 hours is a long time.
Description: A mysterious pandemic causes a quarter of the world to permanently lose the ability to sleep—without any apparent health implications. The outbreak creates a new class of people who are both feared and ostracized, most of whom optimize their extra hours to earn more money.
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Why you should try it: Take a step back to the past with this complex historical novel that focuses on the lives of healthcare workers during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Description: This novel, set in 1918 Dublin, offers a three-day look at a maternity ward during the height of the Great Flu pandemic.
A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen
Why you should try it: Jump into the future and imagine rebuilding after an apocalyptic pandemic that looks eerily similar to our present.
Description: Four survivors try to rebuild their personal lives six years after a global pandemic brings about a literal apocalypse.
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
Why you should try it: Developing vaccines takes time and money, but most importantly, test subjects for clinical trials. This book features a candidate whose vaccine reaction was not within the expected realm of possibility.
Description: Signing up for an experimental vaccine trial in London in the face of a pandemic, disgraced 27-year-old marine biologist Neffy—when the lines between past, present, and future begin to blur—is left with defining questions: Who can she trust? Why can’t she forgive herself? How should she live, if she survives?
About Dontaná
Dontaná is a Collection Management Librarian who was born with an unending reading list. She is almost always reading two books simultaneously and is easily distracted by cool covers.
