A quarantine reading list

Lois Beckett is a senior reporter at the Guardian covering gun policy, criminal justice and the far right in the United States. She compiled a list of "some of the brilliant pandemic novels that everyone is talking about, and some novels about being alone... [and] some comfort reads, and poetry, and books about people being thoughtful and useful and kind," including:

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

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. 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 gripping, fast-moving novel, a good choice for long days of isolation. I read it all alone in a cabin in the woods, and I forgot myself, and I could not put it down.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: The Great Believers.

--Marshal Zeringue