A review by nocto
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel by The Authors Guild, Douglas Preston, Margaret Atwood

3.5

This book caught my eye in the library though I hadn’t heard of it before I saw it on the shelf. I can’t remember how they shelved it either, I’ve just gone with “Various Authors” as the author which will cover me if I ever read another book written by a cast of different authors. I’d guess most of the books that would come under that are collections of stories which I don’t tend to read. And this is very much a collection of stories too.

The book is a product of the pandemic lockdowns when a group of authors collaborated on the story. And the story is set in the pandemic lockdown; write what you know and all that I guess. It very much is a collection of stories told by the residents of a New York apartment building who get to know each other better by being confined together through the lockdown. I know some of the authors and have never heard of others; I liked some of the stories and others weren’t especially interesting to me. I didn’t pay enough attention to the afterword that tells you who wrote what to know if those two were related but my guess would be that there’s not that strong a correlation if there is any. I enjoyed it enough to keep reading at any rate.

There’s a twist near the end that, I don’t want to spoil anything, but it would probably have seen me throw the book across the room if it happened in another book. Here though, I was willing to take it. Like any good twist you feel like you could have, maybe should have, seen it coming, but it doesn’t matter that you didn’t. I don’t think it’s a great book, but I do think it’s an interesting cultural artefact and I’m happy to have read it.