Now's the time to catch up on your reading list, so dive into the themes of the moment with these novels, which offer a glimpse into imagined crises and the resilient characters who face them

If there&#39;s one piece of advice that&#39;s been dominating the coronavirus pandemic, it&#39;s social distancing. Staying home is the most responsible way for us all to prevent the outbreak from getting worse than it has to, but halting normal life for weeks or months on end can be a daunting task. So when you&#39;re tired of Netflix marathons, Zoom calls, and face masks&nbsp;while you work for home, why not escape with some dystopian books?

While reading for entertainment sounds great in theory, it can be hard to focus if your novel of choice is just a little bit too positive or misaligned with the times. A main character that&#39;s going about normal life just doesn&#39;t get it,&nbsp;whether it&#39;s a story focused on finding romance or a memoir written any time before we had to stay home due to a public health crisis. Perhaps the solution is to read some dystopian books that follow a fictional pandemic, so you can get your mind off the news headlines while still digesting a story that understands what the world is going through right now. With how downright apocalyptic some of the premises are, they just may help you to feel better about the social distancing spell you&#39;re currently in. Read on for our top ten pandemic-focused dystopian books, and get ready to have a pile of exciting page-turners to work through while you work from home.

Just before World War I, young and naive Hans Castorp visits his cousin Joachim in the Berghof Sanatorium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps. Hans&#39;&nbsp;stay gets longer as his own health declines and the weeks become years. Soon, he gets tuberculosis and learns from other fascinating patients: an Italian encyclopaedist, a hedonistic Dutchman, and the enigmatic Clawdia Chauchat. Isolated from the rest of the world, Hans&nbsp;loses his bearings thanks to the sanatorium&#39;s consistent rituals. Thomas Mann wanted this dark humour dystopian novel to help his hero &quot;to understand what it is to go through the deep experience of illness and death to arrive at a higher degree of reason and health&quot;, and perhaps that message will teach us something as we navigate a major pandemic a century later.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

In this Inspector Adamsberg novel,&nbsp;writer Fred Vargas puts&nbsp;plague centre stage of his&nbsp;dystopian book. As&nbsp;black paint&nbsp;on Paris doors is&nbsp;linked to suspicious deaths, a town crier receives anonymous messages announcing the return of the &quot;wrath&nbsp;of God&quot;. With the help of scholar Decambrais, Adamsberg tries&nbsp;to unravel why this is happening and prevent panic from spreading in the capital.

Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas (2001)

Pretty and conceited, Kitty Garstin agrees to marry Walter, a bacteriologist and physician, out of fear that her younger sister will beat her to this milestone. She leaves for&nbsp;Hong Kong with her&nbsp;slightly dull husband&nbsp;and almost immediately begins&nbsp;an affair with a superficial diplomat, who is also married. The drama of the affair eventually mixes with that of a cholera epidemic in China, where Walter has gone to help. Deeper than it seems, this novel by W. Somerset Maugham, who also studied medicine,&nbsp;was adapted for film in 2006, starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. With two ways to experience the story of this dystopian book, you can keep yourself occupied for even longer.

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham (1926)

This novel, which won the Femina Prize in 2012, passionately romanticises the life of bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. A prominent member of the Pasteur Institute, Yersin discovered&nbsp;the bacterium that causes the plague, which was named Yersinia pestis in his honour, but abandoned his career to devote himself to his multiple passions (like botany, architecture, and mechanics).&nbsp;In 1894, he discovered&nbsp;the bacterium&nbsp;that&nbsp;would&nbsp;bear his name in Hong Kong, where a terrible plague epidemic raged on,&nbsp;before developing a vaccine. Deville apprehends this biography of Yersin as the mad race of an idealist, who, far from being a scientist stuck in his laboratory, was an adventurous hero in his own way.

Plague & Cholera by Patrick Deville (2012)

A super flu&nbsp;virus goes around&nbsp;an American army research base, then spreads outside thanks to a soldier who flees and infects everyone who crosses his path. This highly lethal disease has a contamination rate of 99.4%, and in a few weeks, the whole world is affected. Civilisation disappears, leaving only a handful of survivors who were naturally immune to the disease. Among Stephen King&#39;s&nbsp;most powerful novels &mdash; and, we hope, not too visionary &mdash;&nbsp;The Stand&nbsp;mercilessly criticises&nbsp;an America without morals, obsessed with money and power (today, Stephen King is one of the most fervent critics of Donald Trump). Though many may freak out over how close this dystopian book hits home, the author promises that he believes coronavirus will have a much less obliterative fate, especially if we take precautions.

The Stand by Stephen King (1978)

A brilliant compilation by American philosopher and activist Susan Sontag, this book brings together two works written 10&nbsp;years apart. The first relates to cancer, with a detailed pathology&nbsp;that&nbsp;Sontag links to classic texts from the likes of Keats, Dickens, Baudelaire, Henry James, and James Joyce,&nbsp;dissecting&nbsp;the ideologies behind the demonisation of certain illnesses and the ensuing guilt&nbsp;for the patient. The second concerns AIDS, a &quot;new plague&quot; still full of mysteries for the medical community, which, in the 1980s,&nbsp;resuscitated&nbsp;the great fear of a pandemic, especially tied to the LGBTQ communities. With many comparing and contrasting coronavirus with the AIDS crisis, now is the perfect time to educate yourself on the social, political, and ideological aspects so you can develop your own opinion.

Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag (1978 and 1988)

This sci-fi fable follows the path of an 8-year-old girl, Kirsten, who appears in a play and&nbsp;witnesses the death of a legendary actor on stage. In the weeks that follow, a sudden pandemic wipes&nbsp;out a large part of humanity, leaving only a few survivors in small scattered cities. 20 years later, Kirsten is still part of a traveling troupe of performers, which tours in Michigan and promotes culture as an essential element of survival. On her way, she will follow disturbing disappearances and meet many intriguing figures. This exciting dystopian book will be adapted this year into an HBO Max&nbsp;series starring Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel,&nbsp;and Gael Garc&iacute;a Bernal, so now is the time to read up before everyone is talking about the next streaming hit.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

This dystopian book&nbsp;imagines&nbsp;a sensual and dangerous world where illness, love, and death are dizzyingly intertwined. At the end of the 19th century, in a small Caribbean town, young telegraphist Florentino Ariza falls&nbsp;in love with a beautiful schoolgirl, Fermina Daza. They exchange letters for&nbsp;three years until Fermina decides&nbsp;to marry Doctor Juvenal Urbino, who heroically treats the sick during a cholera epidemic. Florentino, desperate,&nbsp;continues to love Fermina from afar. Gabriel Garc&iacute;a M&aacute;rquez dissects love in all its forms, even the most toxic, like a disease of the soul without a cure.

Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)

This dystopian book&nbsp;by&nbsp;Jack London takes place in 2073, 60 years after a pandemic has ravaged our entire civilisation (yikes). In a decivilised California, an old professor tries to teach a group of unknowing children about the world before the epidemic and the selfishness that existed before the illness. It preserves a last centre of civilisation in the form of a library hidden in a cave, telling a story that&#39;s humbling while putting our current situation into perspective.

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London (1912)

Adapted for film in 1971 by Luchino Visconti,&nbsp;Death in Venice&nbsp;is&nbsp;the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous German writer who begins a journey&nbsp;in Venice before the First World War. At the Hotel du Lido, he meets and follows Tadzio, a teenager with fascinating beauty. In the grip of inner torments, Gustav&nbsp;contracts a kind of Asian cholera that is ravaging the city.&nbsp;Thomas Mann masterfully links the desire for love and the desire for death in an obsessive tale, which we recommend reading while listening to a calming&nbsp;symphony to maximise the beautiful dystopia.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912)

For the little ones (and the adults who would rather not read a dystopian book), this story&nbsp;follows Amos, a zookeeper loved by all animals who wakes up one day with a cold and must stay in bed, resulting in all his friends stopping by to help him through the difficult time.&nbsp;The book was inspired by an elephant&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/categories/art">drawing</a>&nbsp;that Erin E. Stead had dropped years before, which gave&nbsp;husband&nbsp;Philip C. Stead&nbsp;the idea to make a children&#39;s book with her, to make her want to create again. This book has earned many awards and will remind you of the power of friendship, even when we&#39;re only contacting our loved ones over video call.

10 Dystopian Books To Read While You Practice Social Distancing

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