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Fourteen Days

Fourteen Days

A collaborative novel
Pages
374
Published
2022
Language
English

Synopsis

One week into the first COVID lockdown, the tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building start climbing to the roof each evening at seven to cheer for medical workers. Someone brings a folding chair. Someone else starts talking. Within days the whole building is gathering there after dark, trading stories to fill the hours below.

The building's young superintendent keeps count. She learned the job watching her father manage a building in Queens, and she has inherited a ledger from a predecessor, nicknamed the Fernsby Bible, that logs tenants and their habits. She adds to it now, secretly recording the stories on her phone as neighbors who once passed each other in the stairwell reveal marriages, debts, crimes and reinventions.

Thirty-six writers contributed a story apiece, and the book withholds every byline until its final pages, so no voice announces its author. General editors Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston shaped the results into fourteen nights of testimony, built like the Decameron: strangers sealed off from a plague, talking their way toward each other.

It reads less like a single novel than a chorus. Each rooftop night is its own short piece, in its own register, some comic and some grim, held together by the superintendent's watchful, cataloguing voice. Anyone curious which famous name wrote which story ends up reading the book twice.

Authors

C
Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is the author of the bestselling novels Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. Her books explore family, identity, and the secrets that lie beneath the surface of ordinary lives.

D
Douglas Preston

American author best known for the Agent Pendergast thriller series, co-written with Lincoln Child since Relic (1995). He also writes solo thrillers and nonfiction on archaeology, exploration and natural history, including The Monster of Florence and The Lost City of the Monkey God. He began his career at the American Museum of Natural History and has served as president of the Authors Guild.

J
John Grisham

Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, he was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel. Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff for a pro career,...

M
Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, essayist and literary critic. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, on 18 November 1939, she has written more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, criticism and graphic work, published in more than forty-five countries. Her novels include The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which won the Governor General's Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and its sequel The Testaments (2019), a joint winner of the Booker Prize. She h...

M
Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer is a novelist known for her sharp observations on social dynamics and gender. She edited The Best American Short Stories 2017 and wrote the novel The Female Persuasion.