IN THEORY, 2020’s lockdown should have provided the perfect conditions for major outbreaks of bibliophilia.

But, following an intense publishing year in 2019, when The Washington Post book section declared that “fascism is back in fashion” and classics like  Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Sinclair Lewis’s It Could Happen Here shot up bestseller lists, 2020 ironically seemed less fevered — the rise of Covid-19 and the US presidential election shifted the ground beneath publishing’s feet somewhat.  

Faced with a worldwide assault on democracy, with authoritarian populism gaining traction in countries including Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil and, of course, the US and Britain, many writers seemed to have entered the depressive stage of the grief cycle.