There are times when the publication of a book, or your discovery of it, appears prescient in the extreme. In February, for instance, I read Jenny Offill’s Weather and via it found a way to think through the immediate aftermath of Australia’s most catastrophic fire season on record. In April, mid-lockdown, I read Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena and discovered in his discussion of how the Black Death fundamentally altered the way we understand our place in the world, and our aesthetic representations of it, an echo of the question I have been asking myself and those close to me: how will Covid-19 continue to shape our private selves and the face we make public into the future? In late May, I read Teju Cole’s essay ‘Death in the Browser Tab’, his response to the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott by police officer Michael Slager, to the video footage of that shooting, to the experience of viewing that footage on line, and I thought, again, of George Floyd.

• Tags: Anna MacDonald, Issue 20, Patrick Allington