pandemic tales on the way, with Jodi Picoult finding inspiration in a tourist stranded abroad, while Margaret Atwood is teaming up with the likes of Dave Eggers and John Grisham on a “collaborative novel” about Manhattan residents thrown together by lockdown.
“We members of the human race have been through a very difficult time here on planet Earth, and it’s not over yet,” Atwood told the Frankfurt fair via video link.
“Already the writers have begun to bear witness,” said the Canadian author, who is editing the novel Fourteen Days: An Unauthorised Gathering, scheduled for release in 2022.
The newest title by Picoult, whose international bestsellers include The Pact and My Sister’s Keeper, comes out next month, and will be one of the first pandemic books by a major novelist to hit stores.
Picoult said she wrote Wish You Were Here as a way “to make sense of 2020”.
“Artists are meant to find meaning in the things that we don’t understand and a worldwide pandemic qualifies,” the US writer told AFP by email.
Although fewer international publishers and authors are attending the fair this year because of the pandemic, German author John von Dueffel will be in Frankfurt on Friday to tell audiences about his Covid-inspired novel.
In The Angry and The Guilty, a woman has to go into quarantine just as the family patriarch is dying.
Not everyone is convinced readers will embrace these early pandemic-themed novels.
Renowned German literary critic Denis Scheck warned against “rushing out” these stories, saying it takes very skilled authors to meaningfully capture historic events in real time.
Scheck noted that many readers have instead been turning to classics like Albert Camus’ The Plague, which has taken on new relevance in the Covid era.
“Literature can teach us how to die,” Scheck said.
