WORKING through the PANDEMIC

Novel written by 36 authors follows renters, workers in 2020

- STEVEN W. BEATTIE

Proceeds from "Fourteen Days," set in a New York City apartment building, will go to support the U.S. Authors Guild Foundation.

"I've written 40 books," says bestselling U.S. author Douglas Preston. "Without doubt, this was the most difficult literary project I've ever worked on."

The project in question is "Fourteen Days," the new collaborative novel edited by Preston and Margaret Atwood, and containing stories written by 36 individual North American authors. Set during the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns in New York City, the novel focuses on a group of essential workers and lower-income renters in a decrepit apartment building who take to the roof to congregate in a socially distanced setting and tell each other stories to pass the time and maintain a semblance of community and social engagement.

Authors of the various stories include writers as diverse as John Grisham, Tommy Orange, Celeste Ng, Scott Turow, Erica Jong, R.L. Stine, and Ishmael Reed, alongside Atwood and Preston themselves. Proceeds from the sale of the novel go to support the U.S. Authors Guild Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to promotion and advocacy of writers and the freedom to read.

As causes go, it's a worthwhile endeavour and a uniquely entertaining way of fundraising.The novel's structure featuring individual stories linked by a framing narrative penned by Preston recalls Bocaccio's "Decameron "(especially in the plague background) and Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City." But unlike those single-authored works, Preston found it a unique challenge to create a through-line that would not render the different voices and styles of the contributors into a kind of literary Tower of Babel.

"There was a lot of concern that the end product would not make any sense," Preston says. "I was terrified."