On the same page: Novels about limbo and isolation to keep you company at home

Is it just us, or has Covid-19 left the world stuck on pause? We don’t just mean the lockdowns that bring society to a standstill – we’re also talking about the second, third, and even fourth waves of the virus that sweep out from nowhere, leaving us holding our breath permanently.

If you’re feeling the ‘here we go again’ blues from Singapore’s heightened restrictions, we’ve dedicated this May ‘s curation of novels to limbo in its many aspects – solitude, time loops, and trances galore.

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegurt

If you’re feeling the ennui creep in from Singapore’s sort-of-not-quite lockdown 2.0, it’s a little taste of the numb horror of Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, in which the whole world is stuck in replay for a solid decade.

Another dark-humored, absurdist ride from the famed author of Slaughterhouse-Five, this novel imagines a random ‘timequake’ which thrusts the world of 2001 back in time to 1991. But forget fixing the past – folks are forced to watch themselves helplessly repeating every action they first chose for the next ten years.

From drunk driving to marrying the wrong person, the novel rambles over anecdotes of the despair and apathy wrought by taking the wrong step in life – again. It poses knotty questions about free will and determinism, with characters struggling to find the point of life even when the time for free choice comes round once more. Seasoned with Vonnegut’s brand of sardonic wit, this is a postmodern stunner.

Timequake is available on Book Depository.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh

Don’t be fooled by the hippie-dippie title – Eat, Pray, Love this razor-sharp novel is not. A dark riff on the self-help tale, My Year of Rest and Relaxation stars a blonde, beautiful socialite who sets out to spend as few hours of her empty existence awake as possible.

Freshly fired from her job, she plans to coast along for a year on her sizeable inheritance. But her glittering Upper East Side life can’t seem to fill the void of real connection in her life – from indifferent, now-deceased parents to a banker boyfriend who constantly leaves.

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The solution? Chemical hibernation – that’s to say, drugs. Popping anxiety and sleeping pills at scheduled intervals to keep herself in a continuous coma, she hopes to wake healed and happier in a year. A twisted take on the wellness reset that we’re all familiar with, Ottessa Moshfegh tackles the modern sickness of alienation with bleak comedy and tenderness. The perfect novel for reading in isolation.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is available on Book Depository.

Severance, Ling Ma

Ever felt like a zombie shuffling through your daily grind? In Ling Ma’s debut work, this feeling gets uncomfortably literal. Part post-apocalyptic novel, part capitalist satire, Severance imagines a plague with a quirky twist – those infected repeat their routines compulsively until they die.

Living amidst this slow-burn apocalypse is uninfected millennial Candace, who deals with the collapse of society in a way we can all recognise – toiling as an office drone, of course.

Despite there being no one around to read, she sticks to the terms of her contract as a publishing assistant until it expires, at which point she finally has to face the question of survival. Wryly clever and uncanny, this novel draws on the zombie trope to reflect on modern corporate slavery and the way we take refuge in work routines. Read this after you clock out of your 9-to-5.

Severance is available on Book Depository.

The Stranger in the Woods, Michael Finkel

As the last lockdown showed us, two months without social contact can feel like an eternity. So how about two decades? Recounted by journalist Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit chronicles the astounding life of a man who turned his back on society and disappeared into the woods of Maine – for 27 years.

Leaving his Massachusetts home and family with no warning when he was twenty, Christopher Knight passed his next three decades without speaking to another human being. Cocooned in absolute – and apparently blissful – solitude, he survived through ingenious ways of stealing food and crafting shelters, living close to society but never glimpsed by anyone.

Through intimate interviews with Knight, Finkel pieces together a hypnotic tale of a ‘hermit’ who built a kingdom of one in isolation – free to a degree we cannot imagine.

The Stranger in The Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit is available on Book Depository.

The Dreamers, Karen Thompson Walker

More poetic than plague-driven, Karen Thompson Walker’s second novel is the dreamiest reinvention of the pandemic genre we’ve seen yet. At the heart of The Dreamers is a sleeping virus that puts the infected into a coma-like limbo – yet neural scans show that their brains are buzzing with more activity than has ever been recorded in any human brain.

As some of the sleepers begin to wake, it becomes clear they have been dreaming of events to come – not only in their own futures, but in what seems to be parallel lives.

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Don’t expect an action-packed novel – the beauty of The Dreamers lies in Walker’s lyrical prose and her haunting portraits of fear and love. From a woman who gives birth in her sleep, to a man who dreams of his comatose lover being cured, the novel is a luminous glimpse of the possibilities just out of reach of our waking lives.

The Dreamers is available on Book Depository.

This article was first published in City Nomads.