Just when you thought the wave of Covid novels had passed, along comes a new variant. Examples so far have ranged from Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, which succeeded because it looked sideways at the pandemic and created something rich and strange from it, to Sarah Moss’s The Fell, which didn’t because it was too faithful a rendition of an immediate past we all wanted to forget.
But it’s the immediate past that colours our expectations of the future, and in Clare Pollard’s funny and sharp debut novel, Delphi, the unnamed narrator is “sick of the future. Up to here with the future.” It’s 2020 and she is battered by predictions of further epidemics and AI extinction and civilisational collapse. “No one used to have to deal with this much future.”
