I read it all alone in a cabin in the woods, and I forgot myself, and I could not put it down. This is a gripping, fast-moving novel, a good choice for long days of isolation. It tells two stories in parallel, one unfolding in 1985, as Yale Tishman, a young art expert, begins to lose his friends to Aids, and the second in 2015, as Fiona, whose brother died from Aids in 1985, searches for her missing daughter, and must confront her unresolved grief. This is a novel about the long consequences of trauma and loss, set among a group of gay friends in Chicago at the very beginning of the Aids epidemic. As Alison Willmore, a film critic at Vulture, wrote: “We should all be reading Ling Ma’s Severance, not just because of the pandemic parallels, but because its heroine’s survival seems to depend on her resistance to nostalgia.” The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai Somehow, she becomes one of the last people in Manhattan left alive, before fleeing into the wilderness in a yellow New York City taxi. Candace is sharp, sardonic, and before the world ends, slightly diffident.

The narrator is Candace Chen, who works in publishing in New York City, overseeing the Bibles division. Looking for a pandemic novel that’s also a satire of global capitalism? In Severance, the pandemic that ends civilization is the Shen fever, believed to have originated in Shenzen, China, the center of electronics manufacturing, and then spread through tiny fungal spores across the globe. If you’ve read Station Eleven already, the author has a much anticipated new novel out this month: The Glass Hotel, about a global Ponzi scheme and a woman who vanishes.

“Survival is insufficient,” they keep reminding each other, even as survival itself is far from guaranteed. The real drama of the novel doesn’t come from gore or gun battles, but from the protagonists’ constant reckoning with just how much they have lost. One band of characters forms a post-apocalyptic Shakespeare troupe and they travel the wilds of Canada, staging old plays in exchange for food. The 2014 novel moves back and forth between the first days of a pandemic that ends civilization, and the long aftermath, as small groups of survivors try to rebuild. Once you’ve read Station Eleven, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Photograph: Publicity image Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel

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