14 Days, edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

A run down New York apartment building during the 2020 COVID lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ is the setting for this series of short stories. A group of residents collect on the roof every evening to cheer essential workers and share some kind of community amid the fear and despair. They are the ones who could not afford to flee the city and are largely older, poorer, less white, more queer. Seemingly with little in common but their plight, they bicker and bond as they share stories of friends, lovers, families, pasts and distant homelands. Billed as a collaborative novel, this is something of a concept album, with 36 short stories from a disparate group of well-known authors, set within a framework. Readers don’t know who has written which story until an appendix lists them alphabetically and identifies their character/s and tale/s. Editor and contributor Douglas Preston has done the heavy lifting in setting the framework and fitting all the stories and characters into some kind of coherent whole. But there are so many characters, known only by nicknames, that it is easy to lose track of who is who. The quality of the stories varies from stunningly memorable to dull rubbish and a few serve as baffling interludes that don’t really fit the narrative, until a twist at the end ties everything together. This is an interesting exercise that provides a poignant reminder of what should not be forgotten from a bizarre and terrifying period of recent history that is already fading from view.