All of the candles are amazing and I don’t find them overly flowery beautiful subtle scents - good for the soul!

John winds up contracting the virus and being relocated to a quarantine centre on Lamma, where he reconnects with a young activist on the district council he had met previously. We use 12 pigments inks to create every single piece, meaning that your art print is guaranteed to last up to 100 years. As John reflects: “the old form of writing has almost been forgotten”, and in this new world, O’Sullivan guides us to ask questions we hadn’t before. I knew it was meant as a kind of gasp of shock at the end of their plea, a crowning moment of appeal. And it hasn’t been easy: in a survey released in July last year by the relationship support organisation Relate, 38 per cent of 16- to 34-year-olds in relationships said they had struggled to support their partner emotionally during lockdown.Lockdown Lovers foregrounds a bleak emotional landscape, “an intense epidemic of loneliness”, which, though illuminated by the lockdown, seems to precede it.

But for fledgling lockdown relationships across the country, the real test will be in the coming months. Lockdown Lovers sheds light on the lockdowns that many of us we were already living, not just in Hong Kong but globally: the academics, scurrying between offices, avoiding social interaction; spouses uprooted hundreds and thousands of miles from home to raise a family and endure “long silent years of isolation”. As a reader, it felt good to laugh about these shared experiences and to know that it’s all right and even normal to be anti-social these days. John Mandel’s Station Eleven some years earlier and couldn’t wrap my imagination around the post-pandemic sections of the book. In the novel, present-day John remembers spending time in the United College Library Archives at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, looking through Hennessy’s letters from Hong Kong.This entry was posted in 2021 Books, 2023 Entries, Cha Review of Books and Films, Lockdown Lovers, Lucy Hamilton, Lucy Hamilton—Cha, Michael O'Sullivan, Michael O'Sullivan, Lockdown Lovers, Penguin Random House SEA, Penguin Random House SEA. In an illuminating meeting between John and an old friend, they discuss Hong Kong’s “infection mentality” and pose Hong Kong as a city whose decision to “self-isolate” and withdraw to the margins began long before the pandemic. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books‘ China Blog, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. Couples will maybe get a shock to their system after they realise that person isn’t the same, because they probably won’t be exactly the same. I had to chuckle when I came across this part because thirty years ago I, too, spent my lunch hours in the same spot, pouring through back issues of the Far Eastern Economic Review to see if Jiang Qing and Pol Pot were still alive.

Lahore, Pakistan: Lakir Art GalleryEvent: Lockdown Lovers, Lakir, 108 A Block, Faisal Town, Lahore, Pakistan. Years from now, perhaps someone will study the psychology of living through a pandemic and the various coping mechanisms we turn to. The illusive and unreal Hong Kong, so fitting for the flâneur, has now become so regulated as to be almost unrecognisable.He reversed restrictions and began to allow Chinese to own land and buildings in Central and to become British subjects. I think the big thing will be how our relationship will be in normal life, because we have been in such a bubble with each other. Lockdown Lovers is a story set across two continents, six humans and a pangolin, the mammal reportedly at the root of the virus. It was turned right off its food having to wade through the bloodied scales and entrails of its brothers and sisters every morning. When Lockdown Lovers opens with “Hong Kong February–March, 2020”, we expect a flashback to hysteria and paranoia.

He spends the early days of the pandemic in a 24-hour McDonald’s in Sai Kung while his wife Sue is home with their sickly baby son, Sam. Sue’s family is in Hong Kong and she has a support system in the city, but he can’t help but worry about his parents half a world away.In this pandemic-ridden world, this novel reminds us how human contact will never cease to be mankind’s saving grace through the darkest times.