Call me strange, but for some reason I’ve gravitated to pandemic fiction these last few months. I re-read The Plague by Camus, tried Jose Saramago’s Blindness but only got a third of the way through it, and just finished the historical novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. 

Though The Plague was more profound, Year of Wonders was more enjoyable. I was pulling for Anna, the protagonist, who suffers loss upon loss but emerges the stronger for them. 

I was whisked away to a 17th-century English village (based on a real place), which decided when faced with the Black Death to keep the disease contained within its boundaries. The citizens voluntarily quarantined themselves, suffering much greater loss of life than if they had run at the first sign of illness. 

Knowing that once, long ago, a group of ordinary folk decided to take this step, to give up their own lives to save others, makes this an especially powerful moral message to contemplate.