Just as powerful are her awed descriptions of the virus itself, which Edith respects as a work of art in its own right. With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to.

At fifty-nine, Edith is living alone at Burntcoat, her warehouse-sized studio-cum-apartment, purchased several years earlier with the proceeds from a prestigious prize.The novel’s setting’s some version of the real but the circumstances in which a novel virus, AG3, takes hold are far more dramatic - perhaps because its actions and consequences are distilled and filtered via Edith’s experiences. Her mother Naomi I find especially fascinating and the sections where she is in the narrative are the ones I most enjoy. As a stand-in for the people who experienced COVID, Edith ponders what we can learn about humanity in such a situation, which connects the text to The Plague. Hall has written an emotionally-charged novel that is tribute, extended nightmare, love story and - somehow - manages to claw back some kind of human dignity and strength in the face of the inevitability of death. Hall highlights instantly recognisable features through the scenes witnessed by Edith: aggressive racism; rampant individualism and hoarding; street protests and deniers; a collapsing health system presided over by a tottering, ineffectual government, marked by its indecision and cronyism.

It’s written in a nonlinear and in some places dreamlike way, to start with I found it confusing but it gets into a style that was suited to a woman looking back, remembering her childhood (also a difficult time as her mother suffered brain damage after a haemorrhage), her early adult years and now post pandemic facing probable death from the virus recurring. Each collection comprises just a handful of shades, dyed on a variety of yarn bases and is released as I'm reading a book I'm loving.Edith herself is damaged, a survivor of a difficult childhood and now a marked woman whose body’s harbouring a likely-fatal, post-viral disease. It is narrated by 59-year old Edith Harkness, a survivor, who surveys the life-changing pandemic with the benefit of intervening time. Burntcoat by Sarah Hall is, however, one of the first novels – and, although admittedly a bold claim, possibly the first literary masterpiece – to be written during lockdown and to explicitly reference Covid-19. In the interview I was asked if my proposal was realistic, whether it would exceed the funding, who my influences were.