No pubs, no kissing, no flying: how Covid-19 is forcing authors to change their novels

Never mind newly minted corona lockdown stories, authors are frantically rewriting existing projects to reflect a world turned upside down by the pandemic – or shelving them indefinitely

Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, has been having a busy lockdown. Signed up to write a political thriller called The House, he and his co-author Imogen Robertson have been rapidly rejigging their novel to reflect a post-Covid world.

Their near-future setting now includes a national inquiry “about what’s going on in the background”, where characters – if they meet socially – “choose not to drink out of glasses and they wipe the bottle before they drink”, and undergo temperature checks when entering public buildings, “which everyone is used to by then”, says Watson, who is finding life away from politics as a newly minted thriller author “a relief”.

I’m trying to work out where we might be. Will getting on a plane feel wildly anachronistic? Will working from an office seem weird?

Conducting a crime investigation under lockdown rules would be a mammoth task … I'd fail unless I sought advice from officers working through it

People need relatable fiction about a confusing time. I hope it might make some feel less alone and give a sense of hope

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