When I was very lonely in New York, one of the things that most comforted me was to wander up Broadway or along the East River, alone but in the company of thousands of strangers. Anonymised by the multitude, I felt the burden of my sorrow slide off me. It was a relief to be part of a whole, no longer agonisingly singular but a drop in what Walt Whitman once called “the rolling ocean the crowd”.
Until last year, the crowd was the trademark of the city. All through the day and night, people shoaled together, hurrying through streets, dawdling in parks, jostling at protests, concerts and football matches, like so many bees in a hive. Pre-pandemic, any film that wanted to kindle an atmosphere of eeriness needed only to show one of the world’s great cities empty of people to instantly convey disaster. From I Am Legend to 28 Days Later, the depopulated city is axiomatic of catastrophe.
Speculative fiction and historical fiction are closer cousins than one might think, and alternate-history novels (such as Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s “The Difference Engine”) can give enterprising writers the chance to work in both genres at once. Fans of such stories will be richly entertained by the lavish world-building and breakneck plotting of Natasha Pulley’s “The Kingdoms,” and it’s best to approach the book knowing as little as possible, in order to experience the reveal of its setting along with its amnesiac protagonist.
Nadifa Mohamed’s third book, The Fortune Men, a fictionalised retelling of the story of Mahmood Mattan, one of the last men to be executed in Wales and for a crime he didn’t commit, confirms her as a literary star of her generation.