Only a small girl when the society turned in on itself and her parents moved to a small farming community to escape the urban blight of pandemic -it affected everyone everywhere but many people fled the cities for some sort of perceived heightened rural safety – Rosemary only knows interactions with other people, attending concerts and working in a virtual context. One after another, they each gave their variation on that story, and then wandered out into the night.” (P. More so than usual, they all wanted a piece of me, a moment. ‘I drove an hour to get here,’ said another, ‘I’m glad I did.’ I couldn’t sit at home alone tonight,’ one woman said. It sends shivers down your spine to think of such a thing, but for Rosemary, one of two key protagonists in the book whose story takes place in the “After” as the post-pandemic age is known – and yes, the here and now we know is called the “Before” simply but evocatively effective naming – it is all she has ever known. Having experienced a lengthy lockdown this year here in Sydney, it was not too hard for this reviewer to picture a world in which staying at home is the only real option to you. While some people do leave their homes, and some cafes and shops are open (albeit with socially distancing enforced rigidly) and roads do have traffic, though much of it is automated, the vast majority of life, all life for all but a brave minority, takes place within the four walls of home and backyards if you have them. Released in 2019, Song For a New Day finds the USA, and possible the world though that is never made clear (and nor is it really necessary for the story told), dealing with the aftereffects of a pandemic, so virulent and so comprehensively destablising that the only way to deal with it is to order people to their homes permanently.įorget month-long or even year-long lockdowns, which have tested the resilience and humanity of people during the current COVID pandemic, and disrupted the smooth functioning of society, this is a neverending lifestyle of domesticated everything.

(cover image courtesy Harper Collins Books Australia)

A song for a new day by sarah pinsker