This week is a a choose own topic for Top 5 Tuesday hosted by Meeghan. I have listed 5 books wrote covering the extraordinary last 2 years and how subject handled. There will of course be more written! I think there are real life stories and stories that can be imagined about the pandemic creating dilemmas for those leading double lives with two lovers, for example. Of course there are all sorts of stories of the trauma of covid - having lived it; I'm not sure I'm ready for them yet! Or there may be stories where the pandemic is just in the background.
1. Apples never fall by Lianne Moriety. The 'present' part of the book starts on Valentine's Day 2020 and continues forward from there. It flashes back to Sep / October 2019 and further back. By the end of the book the pandemic has started so it is mentioned but as a background subject until a reflective ending.
2. Wish you were here Jodi Piccoult. This one is set right at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. It covers being trapped on Galapagos because of the pandemic but on an island free from covid contrasted with the traumatic times in US covid wards.
4. Chalet by Catherine Cooper. The main part of the book is set in Jan 2020. It was published November 2020 so I suspect the book was finished at the start of 2020. The epilogue is 6 months later so July time and mentions how well a business is going - it is like No! That business would have been closed for months, staff furloughed etc…
3. Is three by Ruth Jones ends at Christmas 2019. At the end of the book some of the characters are due to move to a different country however the implication is that there will be visits home and trips by the other characters to see them. If the book had been written in 2020 or later, it would have worked leaving story as it was in December 2019 when we did not realise what was about to happen. I think for the author it would have been tempting instead of having them sailing into the sunset to allude to the trauma and zoom calls to come!
5. If Roald Dahl wrote 2021. A book of short stories. There was a story about masks and the first story about health and safety gone made me laugh out loud! I think with Roald Dahl's imagination though there would have been more stories about viruses causing havoc! There were not stories about viruses; I suspect the authors thought it was too soon. If book had been wrote later maybe there would have been.
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