Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 (Carcanet), by the Guyanese-British novelist and poet Fred D’Aguiar, recounts interweaving stories of crisis, personal and collective. Within the space of a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic upended ordinary life across the globe, Black Lives Matter protests electrified the United States in a presidential election year, the state of California (where the author now lives) suffered catastrophic forest fires, and D’Aguiar was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. “Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy,” writes the publisher, Year of Plagues “confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals.”