This article about five of Jeannie’s favorite COVID novels was originally published on Shepherd.com.
Why am I passionate about this?
I am an author who also penned a novel during the pandemic, with a timeline that stretched into the first six months of the pandemic–against the advice of my agent and the publishing industry at large. I know many authors choose not to write about intense political and social happenings, but that “life will never be the same again” feeling was something I couldn’t avoid. The pandemic threw people together and kept us apart at the same time. I was intensely interested in its incubator effect as well as the silo aspect quarantining had on all of our lives. COVID novels reflect that and allow us to reflect on those early days and years and their world-shifting changes as we move forward.
What is my book about?
My third novel, Daughter of a Promise, was published in April 2024.
Days after graduating college in the spring of 2019, Betsabé Ruiz’s life is turning out to be nothing less than cinematic. Although her job at a white-shoe Wall Street investment bank is the opportunity of a lifetime, she is not prepared for the magnitude of wealth swirling about her, the long hours and close quarters that infuse her professional relationships with intimacy, nor an unexpected attraction to her boss. And like all great films, Betsabé’s New York dream comes with a twist that challenges her to find a balance between where she came from and where she’s going.
When Bets begins her first post-college job at First Provident in the summer of 2019, she has no idea how drastically the world will change within the year—or where the rollercoaster of life will take her relationships, with friends, family, romances, and most importantly with herself. Daughter of a Promise is a COVID novel, but also a coming of age story, a love story, and a modern retelling of a timeless classic tale.
COVID Novels I Recommend
Tom Lake
By Ann Patchett
Why did I love this book?
As the mother of three grown children who also returned home during the pandemic, I loved Patchett’s usage of an unanticipated reunion to tell her children a long, drawn-out story.
I love novels that explore the theme of inheritance, not of material possessions, but the emotional skills that are handed down between generations. Patchett explores what we share and what we hold back, as well as our children’s seemingly insatiable appetite for stories about our young lives.
This book is also a love story about Northern Michigan and a life dedicated to farming orchards. The protagonist’s point of view may be that of a grown woman in her fifties, but in recounting the love affair of one summer, she reaffirms her own life choices.
For more about my first recommendation for COVID novels, read my initial review.
What is this book about?
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
Day
By Michael Cunningham
Why did I love this book?
As if relationships between siblings and spouses aren’t already complicated enough, Cunningham throws the isolation and distance of COVID into the mix.
I love this author’s ability to turn extremely authentic and simple domestic dramas occurring on one day into revelatory ideas about child-rearing and the expectations family members have of one another. A generation of young parents, their inquisitive children, the devotion of a brother and sister, and an infatuation between brothers-in-law are the subjects of this well-paced work.
The effect of the pandemic on a marriage, on family members’ psyches, and the aftermath of one of their deaths is written with tenderness and insight. This is a fabulous read depicting the new age in which we live.
Read my initial review here.
What is this book about?
As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
Lucy by the Sea
By Elizabeth Strout
Why did I love this book?
Elizabeth Strout is perfecting a practice I’m sold on–the literary recasting of characters from one novel to the next.
In the third of my COVID novels recommendations, I got to return to Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, who were thrown together in a cabin in Maine due to the pandemic. Writing the novel from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Strout includes this pragmatic character’s interior musings, specifically the things we increasingly noticed as time slowed down during COVID.
I could so relate to Lucy’s quirky character: give me ornery, critical, and desperate any day! Weren’t we all?
What is this book about?
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart–the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.
Zero O’clock
By C.J. Farley
Why did I love this book?
This YA novel was the first I read set during COVID times, and it hit me with the urgency of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
I loved the author’s unwavering courage in tackling the racial subject matter head-on. Heartbreaking and whip-smart, it taught me what teens were going through with regard to virtual friendship, classrooms, and pop stardom. Farley’s novel captures a moment in time during the pandemic while others were still processing it.
Like a photo album I wasn’t quite ready to revisit, it portrays the importance of a difficult time in our nation’s history coupled with that uneasy age of adolescence. Entertaining, yes, but like many COVID novels, a historical artifact, definitely.
Read my official blurb for Zero O’Clock.
What is this book about?
Sixteen-year-old Geth Montego must carve a new path for herself in a world turned upside down by the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests.
Geth Montego only has three friends. There’s her best friend Tovah, who’s been acting weird ever since they started applying to the same colleges. Then there’s Diego, who she wants to ask to prom, but if she does it could ruin everything. And there’s the K-pop band BTS, who she’s never seen up close but she’s certain she’d be BFFs with every member of the group if she ever met them for real.
Then Geth’s small town of New Rochelle, New York, becomes the center of a virus sweeping the world. Schools are closed, jobs are lost, and the only human contact she has is over Zoom. After a confrontation with cops, Geth gets caught up in the Black Lives Matter movement and finds herself having to brave the dangers she’s spent months in quarantine trying to avoid.
Geth’s friends, family, and hometown are upended by the pandemic and the protests. Geth faces a choice: Is she willing to risk everything to fight for her beliefs? And what exactly does she believe in, anyway?
Leave the World Behind
By Rumaan Alam
Why did I love this book?
The opening of this book knocked me out, and I was hooked.
I usually veer toward literary, slower, familial dramas (true of some of the other COVID novels I recommend), but this book combined what I love in literary family dynamics with the frightening premise of an inexplicable disaster occurring in the outside world. The suspicion we were quick to possess about others during the early days of the pandemic is heightened to a new level with two couples pitted against each other, one preoccupied with the welfare and antics of their children.
I loved the construct that had even spouses second-guessing each other. The intensity of the situation brought out the worst and eventually the better sides of all the characters, a phenomenon that resonated as I read this book during the first year of the pandemic, at the same time rioters invaded our nation’s capital.
Read my initial review.
What is this book about?
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.
But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
If you enjoyed Jeannie’s recommendations of COVID novels, jead more of her book reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org and Shepherd.com.
As a new farmer in southwest Wisconsin, I read this book as a cautionary tale as well as motivation to keep doing what we are doing – trying to create a model for a mid-sized farm based on a regenerative, diversified operating plan. This story is told well. It is both personal and family memoir as well as a history of the ups and downs of the societal and geopolitical issues that have greatly impacted the American farmer over the past hundred years. Required reading for the frustrated citizen wondering how we got to this point!!
Colored Television
I loved this novel for its sharp, whip-smart observations and turns of phrase. I love a book with funny, revelatory descriptions and this one delivers. It is a simple plot that is basically an excuse to delve into the theme of generational inheritance and trauma. The Fletcher family is scarred by their father’s kidnapping, their inherited wealth, as well as the toxicity of the family business – a styrofoam factory. The character development is thorough with each sibling getting a good chunk of ink, allowing for the nuclear family described from various angles and points in time. We also see the family characters as they bump up against the outside world – employers, spouses, love interests, friends, and employees. These scenes offer comedic dialogue, examples of paranoia, neurosis, and guilt – scenes which the author has great skill in painting to the extent they could be laugh out loud funny and cringe-worthy at the same time. The reader deduces from the opening pages that this is a doomed family, the novel portraying their fall from grace, nevertheless there is so much intelligent language and observation to be soaked up from every page. Highly recommend.
I listened to the audio version of this book of essays as I walked 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
** spoiler alert ** So many people I admire gushed over this book and so I began this book with high hopes. It certainly has good qualities, the language and the voice are strong. This is the story of a couple who had been together in college finding each other again after thirty or forty years and the man, Warren, leaves his wife to be with the woman, Sarah. Their relationship becomes a long, painful, dead-end street. That aside, I couldn’t reconcile Sarah’s character – she was attracted to Warren and pleased he was pursuing her, but never seemed willing to totally commit to moving somewhere to be with him or to share her home with him. She was rigid and and unwilling to compromise and yet when Warren breaks it off it’s like her world has come to an end. Her thoughts and reactions were misaligned. In addition, the author could be repetitive, harping on for pages and pages. There is a good bit of the book dedicated to the main characters’ relationships with their children, the through lines of which got lost for me. I wont be one of those reviewers who complains about not liking the characters, but there were three in this book I just couldn’t listen to any longer.
