iIn the five years since the world woke up to the realities of the Covid-19 era, a series of brilliant, inquisitive novels about the unique and unprecedented nature of this time has already been published. Ellie Smith’s Companion Piece, Louise Erdrich’s Sentence, and Gary Steingart’s Our Village Friends come to mind as three novels that admirably approach the problem in very different ways. We can now add Avtar Singh’s Into the Woods to this ‘pandemic canon’. In a slim 160-plus pages, Singh has created a compelling picture of characters brought together and torn apart by migration, epidemic, and circumstance.
