American elegy IVO DAWNAY The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

Allen Lane £20

There is nothing like writing the fictional version of history before it happens. Back in 2017, Lawrence Wright, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize winner at the New Yorker, started his novel The End of October, about a global pandemic that spreads from Asia to shut down the world.

He finished it in 2019 but by the time it was published, in May last year, the real thing