Covid is turning the great metropolis into something new: a centre of contagion. “The city was made for the virus, with its density … its stacked and packed humanity.”

This compulsively readable novel is the fourth in McInerney’s series about a Manhattan couple, Russell and Corrine Calloway. He adopts a wider lens here, with varying degrees of success: the Calloways’ twins, now in their twenties, have their own sections, though Russell, a book publisher, is still the main voice. He’s a Luddite (he’s heard that eBay is “quite the bazaar”) and a wine bore. Sometimes, though not very seriously, he wonders if, in his mid sixties, he’s becoming an old fart.

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