Lockdown Lovers came out earlier this year and takes place in Hong Kong mainly during the beginning of the pandemic.

When she heard about the number of fledgling couples moving in together during lockdown, the Relate therapist Simone Bose wasn’t surprised. They had met on the dating app Hinge and were meeting up a couple of times a week before coronavirus hit, going on dates and slowly starting to meet each other’s friends. O’Sullivan’s unique and penetrative writing style reminds us of Hong Kong’s malleability and vulnerability to language.As John traverses the city and feels the splashes of street disinfectant on his bare calves, we’re reminded that for many, it wasn’t the virus itself that left us weakened and exhausted, but the clean-up operation, the nose swabs and restrictions. Sue’s family is in Hong Kong and she has a support system in the city, but he can’t help but worry about his parents half a world away. It does mean that there is this kind of closeness that I think I haven’t had in previous relationships. He delivers groceries and medicine to his parents’ porch but the pain is too much when he sees them staring at him from twenty feet away behind the porch door. One of O’Sullivan’s three narrators is John, who is an Irish professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The other characters in the story do not play as prominent a role as John and Phoebe, but still add to the atmosphere of the pandemic.Other symbols of the city, like the bolo baos they queue for, promise momentary escape; as Kwok-ying “inhales deeply […] the sweet-tangy smell of burnt pineapple sugar and freshly-baked bread”, we hear that, “something in this is not about disease”. A few weeks of lockdown turned into a few months, and quickly it felt like their relationship had switched up several gears.