Without festivals

Those of us who look forward to book festivals will no doubt have to accept that this is going to be a lost winter

In the months — or, in subjective terms, several lifetimes — that we have all been social distancing, our attitudes to books and reading have see-sawed, much like our approach to other things such as working in our pyjamas, Netflix, and haircuts. At first we might have been wildly excited to finally catch up on our reading. A month or two later, we began to look for books that reflected our experience — books about isolation, or about epidemics. Yet later, dealing with reality or even anything too new began to be a bit of a chore and we searched