Hensher

Three years on, it remains difficult to think coherently about Covid-19 and the many ways it has changed us. A global pandemic, abstract and vast, rendered painfully real in the most intimate of ways; in freedoms curtailed, in relationships lost, in millions of bodies broken or buried. How do we tell the story of something we can’t see? Is there a legible thread that connects a set of experiences that differ so radically along lines of wealth, geography, health, politics, risk appetite and plain old dumb luck?These…

Philip Hensher’s latest novel, To Battersea Park, is not the first Covid novel – Ali Smith’s turbocharged Summer got there two and a half years ago. Sarah Moss’s The Fell and Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat were also propelled by the narrative potential of pandemic and lockdowns. Hensher, though, has done something rather different and more precarious: written a book that is really a collection of novellas engaging in more or less autobiographical fashion with his experience of Covid.I say precarious because the book feels as if…