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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

As a lifelong bibliophile, I have often relied upon books to buoy me through difficult times. Since March 2020, when the pandemic first began to alter all that we knew and loved, books have been my passport to safely visit people and places without mask, worry or guilt. I have walked the streets of Paris with Chief Inspector Gamache in Louise Penny’s All the Devils Are Here, found myself quaking in a remote mountain estate in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s creepy Mexican Gothic and assisted in solving assorted mysteries confronting a Kent retirement village in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. Fredrik Backman transported me to a small town in Sweden in his heartwarming Anxious People, Marjan Kamali invited me to 1950s Tehran in The Stationery Shop, and Lucy Foley introduced me to a dubious cast of characters gathered on a fictional island off Connemara in The Guest List. Even a deadly pandemic cannot restrict travel by book nor discourage the awakening of imagination through literature.