It’s a nod to the days of major investment in the arts – the commissioning of ‘a statement piece by a radical new artist’, supported by a wealthy patron with the requisite political clout. This story centres around a COVID-like virus; however, the virus presented here is more severe and the public’s response slightly more dangerous. I started out thinking “Ugh, there’s no way I’ll read a pandemic novel right now”, and by the end I was looking it up on Goodreads. Unfortunately for the latter group, the virus remains dormant in the body, awaiting the inevitable reactivation that can come at any time. Plus, the premise sounded intriguing and felt suitably distanced from our own pandemic to enable me to separate the two in my mind (if that makes sense).

The reason for her impending death is Nova (aka AG3) – a more severe virus than COVID but similar in many ways, primed to unleash the maximum devastation, destroying the body from within. Her mother Naomi I find especially fascinating and the sections where she is in the narrative are the ones I most enjoy. In Burntcoat, Sarah Hall has created something vital and vivid, capturing the fragile relationship between life and death. Many scenes felt overwritten and some of the metaphors were over-explained in a way that felt a bit YA.It’s written in a nonlinear and in some places dreamlike way, to start with I found it confusing but it gets into a style that was suited to a woman looking back, remembering her childhood (also a difficult time as her mother suffered brain damage after a haemorrhage), her early adult years and now post pandemic facing probable death from the virus recurring. This is an intense read particularly in the latter half or so of the book when the narrator, Edith meets and falls in love with Halit. I’ve been wanting to read this all year, but my mixed reaction to The Fell by Sarah Moss made me think it might be too soon for a pandemic related book.

A major success in her 20s finances her acquisition of Burntcoat, a large riverside warehouse-like building at the outskirts of an unnamed British town.Oddly enough, I loved the shape-shifting aspect of it, to the point where I wondered whether the various threads might have started off as short stories in their own right. The old wooden boathouses have been demolished or have buckled with rot, the mills converted into chic flats now. Gothic, horror and post-apocalyptic fiction seemed particularly adept at reflecting the all-pervasive end-of-times atmosphere.