Book of the week: Doom

The Scottish-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has put the pandemic in the historical context of catastrophes

Jhumpa Lahiri is “one of the most interesting American writers at work today”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times. Her early work, written in English, won just about every prize going. Then in 2011, she “packed up her family and moved to Rome” – determined to learn to speak and write Italian “like a native”. Nearly ten years on, we have, in Whereabouts, her first novel written in Italian (though now translated into English by Lahiri herself). A short, spare account of a “solitary middle-aged woman wandering around an anonymous city”, it’s an “oddly compelling” study of estrangement.

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