When you are cooped up in your home and tired of the screen, books can give you the getaway to another world. Here’s a list of books that will give you hope and insight to deal with living through a pandemic.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Entrenched in dark humor, this novel is about a woman who decides to sever herself from social life completely and sleep for an entire year. Educated, privileged, and without a care, the protagonist is disturbingly unlikeable. Yet Moshfegh will flip your empathy to her in the blink of an eye.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If you are looking forward to curling up in your blanket with a warm cup of coffee and bury yourself in a classic, this one’s for you. The well-known saga of Florentino and Fermina, who finds fulfillment in love after more than half a century is a must-read for Marquez fans. On the Caribbean coast of Columbia, against the backdrop of a cholera epidemic, lovesickness too is a disease.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
With deaths becoming statistics on webpages, we have stumbled across the fragility of life. How does it feel to be hyperaware of death? A psychic tells the four siblings when they will die, and this results in them shaping their lives negotiating with the idea of death.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
If you are a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, this one’s for you. In a futuristic world ravaged by climate disasters, a young female protagonist creates her own belief system to build a better future. What begins as a tale of survival metamorphoses into creating a new world order, where change is the only constant.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Pick up this one if you have the time to dip yourself into something that spans across both time and space. This multigenerational novel portrays the history and future of a nation across centuries probing questions of race, colonization, globalization, and mass surveillance. Serpell captures the complexities of land with her lush prose, multiple characters and a chorus of mosquitoes.