Mia Levitin

Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel

Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat now enters the lists — the story of a sculptor with a deadlier version of Covid-19 finding inspiration for her final commission

Sarah Hall. [Getty Images] 
issue 09 October 2021

We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles out of the gate have been in capable hands. Zadie Smith reflected on lockdown in Intimations, a slim volume of personal essays; the virus featured in Ali Smith’s Orwell Prize-winning Summer; and Sarah Moss imagines a lockdown hike gone awry in her forthcoming novel The Fell.

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