These titles, with themes such as isolation and addiction, introduce readers to a new Covid generation of authors.

Vi-fi, short for virus fiction, describes contemporary fiction that features the devastating events of world-changing outbreaks and epidemics. Rooted in science fiction, vi-fi draws on bio-thrilling realism and parallel worlds with multiple, dystopian possibilities.

Since 2020 there has been an exponential rise in vi-fi by a new Covid generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time.

We present a podcast, Pandemic Pages, about the latest in pandemic fiction, and here are five books about Covid we'll be looking out for this year:

Day by Michael Cunningham, released 18 January

Published 25 years after his literary masterpiece, The Hours, Cunningham's new book, Day, taps into the Covid genre's sense of a distortion of time.

The plot recounts the troubles of married couple Dan and Isabel and their children, Nathan and Violet, and Isabel's younger wayward brother, who lives a secret life on Instagram in the attic, as they navigate the pressures of lockdown in a brownstone townhouse in Brooklyn.

The narrative is built around the events of three separate days, each a year apart. The first is just as the pandemic is about to hit in 2019, the second during the middle of...