This year’s International Booker prize shortlist is neatly varied, offering generational sagas, magical realism, and personal and political narratives that are “implicitly optimistic” , exploring the current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster.
Among the shortlisted nominees, there is one very small, very quiet, COVID book from Sweden, inspired by the coronavirus pandemic.
Despite reports of the end of the first wave of COVID literature in 2023, and the International Booker 2024 Prize longlist signalling another boom in Latin American fiction, COVID books began appearing on 2024 reading lists once more. And when the International Booker went on to shortlist a COVID novella called The Details on April 9, it confirmed a second wave of pandemic literature had arrived.
