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.
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 her 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?
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
Why you should try it: A classic of plague fiction, exploring how denial of the plague’s existence serves absolutely no one.
Description: First published in an 1842 edition of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, The Masque of the Red Death tells the story of Prince Prospero as he tries to avoid a plague by confining himself and his nobles to a masquerade in an abbey. Often considered a gothic allegory, the story reflects on not only life and death but also the illusion of control.
Severance by Ling Ma
Why you should try it: An eerie dystopian novel that has been on everyone’s minds.
Description: A survivor of an apocalyptic plague maintains a blog about a decimated Manhattan before joining a motley group of survivors to search for a place to rebuild, a goal that is complicated by an unscrupulous group leader.
The Plague by Albert Camus
Why you should try it: Another classic of plague fiction, this novel could be read as what not to do when the plague sweeps through.
Description: Chaos prevails when the bubonic plague strikes the Algerian coastal city of Oran.
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Why you should try it: This one is interesting in that the sickness is the result of a government experiment.
Description: A security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment that only six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte can stop.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Why you should try it: You may have read this one already, but if you haven’t, it is another take on the future after a pandemic.
Description: The sudden death of a Hollywood actor during a production of King Lear marks the beginning of the world’s dissolution, in a story told at various past and future times from the perspectives of the actor and four of his associates.
Pandemic by Robin Cook
Why you should try it: This take on the pandemic focuses on gene-editing biotechnology gone very wrong.
Description: When a heart transplant recipient abruptly dies under suspicious circumstances, veteran medical examiner Jack Stapleton follows leads to a gene-editing biotechnology and the unethical requirements of a megalomaniacal businessman.
The End of October by Lawrence Wright
Why you should try it: This one might feel a little too close to home, as several major aspects resemble our current times.
Description: Investigating dozens of mysterious deaths in an Indonesian internment camp, a World Health Organization doctor finds himself in a race to uncover the origins of a mysterious killer virus and find a cure before it decimates world populations.
The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories From the Pandemic
Why you should try it: These stories from the early days of the pandemic vary wildly, much like our individual experiences of that time.
Description: Presents a collection of short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from 29 authors—including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more—in a project inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
An Eternal Lei by Naomi Hirahara
Why you should try it: How is a closed-to-tourism island mystery like a locked-room mystery? Read this book to find out.
Description: Leilani Santiago finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation that endangers her family and friends after saving a mysterious woman wearing a lei from drowning in Waimea Bay. She must learn of this woman’s identity and connections to others on the island to save herself and those dearest to her.
Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Why you should try it: If you loved Smith’s Seasonal quartet, then this standalone follow-up is for you.
Description: A vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shape-shifting forms that boldly captures the spirit of the times.
Just the Two of Us by Jo Wilde
Why you should try it: The couple at the center of this heartwarming romance, like so many of us, also faced a relationship reckoning brought on by spending every waking—and sleeping—moment with our partners.
Description: A couple on the brink of divorce after 35 years of marriage gets a second chance to rediscover their love now that a pandemic lockdown has forced them to spend more time together.
Violeta by Isabel Allende
Why you should try it: This historical novel offers a unique view of both COVID-19 and the 1918 Influenza, narrated by a woman who experienced both of them and everything in between.
Description: Living out her days in a remote part of her South American homeland, Violeta finds her life shaped by some of the most important events of history as she tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others.
The Fell by Sarah Moss
Why you should try it: This suspenseful and lyrical novel, told from multiple perspectives, examines the different ways restlessness can manifest.
Description: In the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, Kate secretly slips out of her house for a walk on the moors, but what was supposed to be a quick outing turns into a fight for survival when she falls, injured and unable to move.
Panpocalypse by Carley Moore
Why you should try it: This piece of autobiographical fiction is a deeply personal and intimate look at feelings of loneliness amplified by the pandemic.
Description: In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman bikes through a locked-down New York City for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
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.