When life gives you lockdown, make quarantinis!

We are COVID veterans together. We have felt the suspension of plans and certainties, apprehension for our own health and for those dear to us, separation from family and friends. These poems came about in the empty space, the clear table that COVID left in its wake. The palate cleansed allowed thoughts to percolate and mature; sights ‘seen’ frequently over many years were seen as if for the first time, the mystery and majesty of sunlight both in summer and winter, early and late. When we have everything, we can never have enough but when we have less we can appreciate the gifts that surround us, the blessing of presence. Feeling separated, these were an attempt to connect with friends, family, myself. Inside you'll find musings and bemusings on life after death, life before death, depression, dogs, cats, the wonderful world of nature around us, the mysterious world within us, politics, palmistry, children. Speaking of nature, she never got the memo. She just carried on. As should we.

How does one record an extraordinary time? Confined to his Delhi apartment, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee unravels the intimate paradoxes of life he encounters in the first weeks of a global pandemic. His stories about local fish sellers, gardeners, barbers and lovers merge with his concerns for the exodus of migrant labourers, the challenges faced by health workers, and a mother braving checkposts to bring her son home. Drawing inspiration from contemporary literature and cinema, The Town Slowly Empties is a unique window on a world desperate for love, care and hope. Manash is our Everyman, urging us to slow down and mend our broken ties with nature. Written with rare candour and elegance, this meditative book is a compelling account of the human condition that soars high above the empty streets.

2016 was officially the “year of gin” in the UK, with sales topping £1 billion! The brilliantly botanical spirit is much more than tonic’s sidekick, it’s sophisticatedly sippable, and adds depth and flavour to any drink.

Jeffrey Tucker is well known as the author of many informative and beloved articles and books on the subject of human freedom. Now he’s turned his attention to the most shocking and widespread violation of human freedom in our times: the authoritarian lockdown of society on the pretense that it is necessary in the face of a novel virus. Learning from the experts, Jeffrey Tucker has researched this subject from every angle. In this book, Tucker lays out the history, politics, economics, and science relevant to the coronavirus response. The result is clear: there is no justification for the lockdowns. It’s liberty or lockdown. We have to choose. The book includes a foreword by George Gilder.

In the fourth of Peter May's acclaimed China Thrillers, American pathologist Margaret Campbell finds herself back on home soil, only to be faced by a truck full of dead Chinese and an unavoidable confrontation with her past. Beijing detective Li Yan, now based at the Chinese embassy in Washington, is dispatched to find out how his fellow countrymen suffocated in a sealed refrigeration unit in southern Texas - only to find himself face-to-face with the woman who walked out of China, and his life, to return to the U.S. Tasked to work together again to find out who is behind the $100 million trade in illegal Chinese immigrants which led to the tragedy in Texas, they discover that the immigrants were unwitting carriers of a deadly cargo. And still wrestling with the demons of their pasts, Li and Margaret find themselves racing against time to defuse a biological time-bomb that threatens to wipe out not only their future, but that of humankind.

Selections from the "Pandemic Files" published by The Yale Review, the preeminent journal of literature and ideas “If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of COVID-19 and the cataclysmic spring of 2020—a record for us and for posterity—in the arresting voices of poets, essayists, scholars, and health care workers. Ranging from matters of policy and social justice to ancient history and personal stories of living under lockdown, this vivid compilation from The Yale Review presents a first draft of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history. Contributors: Katie Kitamura • Laura Kolbe • Nitin Ahuja • Rena Xu • Alicia Christoff • Miranda Featherstone • Maya C. Popa • Major Jackson • John Witt • Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Nell Freudenberger • Briallen Hopper • Brandon Shimoda • Yusef Komunyakaa • Laren McClung • Eric O’Keefe-Krebs • Sean Lynch • Millicent Marcus • Meghana Mysore • Rachel Jamison Webster • Emily Ziff Griffin • Rowan Ricardo Philips • Kathryn Lofton • Monica Ferrell • Russell Morse • Randi Hutter Epstein • Noreen Khawaja • Victoria Chang • Joyelle McSweeney • Khameer Kidia • Emily Greenwood • Elisa Gabbert • Emily Bernard • Hafizah Geter • Emily Gogolak • Roger Reeves