Fourteen Days

LoveReading Says

Edited by Margaret Atwood, with an outstanding roster of contributing writers — from Atwood herself, to John Grisham, Dave Eggers and Celeste Ng —  it’s hardly surprising that Fourteen Days teems with storytelling magnificence. 

Set in a Lower East Side tenement building at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, this collaborative novel is witty, poignant, funny and surprising. It’s also richly characterful in the manner of The Decameron, and Chaucerian, in that it’s like a contemporary, COVID-era version of The Canterbury Tales, except the pilgrimage is physically limited to a rooftop.

Narrated by the building’s new superintendent, Fourteen Days kicks off with the super finding the keys to the roof terrace. After heading up to escape her basement apartment, she’s joined by other tenants for nightly pot-banging, sunset-watching and story-sharing sessions. With a chapter devoted to a day, each penned by a different writer, each relating stories shared by different tenants, the baton passing between chapters is seamless — the stories are impeccably threaded together, with an overarching narrative around the super being unable to contact her dad, who has dementia and lives in a care home.

All life is revealed through the stories shared. Newcomers appear, and much alcohol is drunk, often to the point of the super and tenants being “half-shit-faced”. There’s loneliness and longing. Friction and bickering. Death, magic, love and loss.

While capturing the very specific context of being trapped in a city during the early days of the pandemic (all those familiar fears, tensions and desires to come together), Fourteen Days also showcases what stories are for — why we tell them, and why the best ones compel us to listen as they speak to our souls. So, pull up a chair or milk crate on the rooftop and prepare to witness a world of humanity, and an incredible feat of storytelling that rises to an almighty, unexpected climax. 

Joanne Owen

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