Confining moments

One of the most frequent questions I was asked during lockdown was: what are you reading? (At least it was better than another: how are you feeling?) Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, a collection of short stories by DH Lawrence, Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing were among my favourites.

Unsurprisingly, with bookshops closed, online book sales have gone up hugely – Waterstones reported a 400 per cent rise at the end of March, with a ‘significant uplift’ for classic titles such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One

Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. We all seem to be spending a lot more time reading since lockdown began. According to a survey by Nielsen Book at the beginning of May, the UK as a whole has nearly doubled the amount of time it spends reading books – from around three and a half hours per week to six. Readers were turning to crime, thrillers and popular fiction, with little interest in dystopian stories. Gardening and DIY, food and drink, puzzle and quiz books were also popular. And Normal

People by Sally Rooney, first published a couple of years ago, has been back in the fiction bestseller list, thanks to the BBC adaptation. Also near the top of the list has been Peter May’s Lockdown, written some 15 years ago. The thriller combines the story of a devastating pandemic with a murder mystery. Not for the faint hearted…

In his feature on page 25, Michael Barber suggests some lockdown reading. Thankfully, restrictions have now been eased – for the moment. Whatever the present situation, his recommendations are still pertinent, with, he reckons, laughter a key ingredient for these times – his personal preference being Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up.

So take a look inside this supplement where you’ll find masses of ideas for summer reading – whether you are self-isolating, locked down or ‘free’.