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Kate Weinberg’s 2019 debut The Truants was a mystery novel. But it was also a homage to the genre, inspired by Agatha Christie’s twisting plots and the dark atmospheres of Donna Tartt. A year later, the author became trapped in her own mystery plot – one much less enjoyable. Feeling faint, dizzy and riddled with aches, she was baffled, as a then 45-year-old woman in good health, about what was happening to her. Eventually, she was diagnosed with long Covid, and she found herself marooned in the no-man’s land of chronic illness, a plotless place with seemingly no way out, no cure, and no neat and tidy ending.
