Description: Drawing as a way of keeping a diary, writing down thoughts in a journal as a way of maintaining a historical record - in watercolours and also in words. These were resources that Amitava Kumar had been using even before the pandemic arrived. But the task gained urgency just when he felt most isolated and afraid. The Blue Book is a writer's artistic response to our present world: one that has bestowed upon us countless deaths from a virus, a flood of fake news, but also love in the face of loss, travels through diverse landscapes, and - if we care to notice - visions of blazing beauty. From one of the acclaimed and accomplished authors of our time, this writer's journal is a panoramic portrait of the experience, both individual and collective, of the pandemic.
Brief description: Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and three novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama's list of favorite books of 2018. His new novel A Time Outside This Time was described by The New Yorker magazine as "a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist." Kumar's nonfiction books include A Matter of Rats, which the New York Times Magazine called "a clear-eyed ode to an implausible place" Lunch With a Bigot listed among the "ten best books of 2015 published by academic presses"