(Guest post by Lucy Jane Bledsoe)

In this year of global illness (not just the pandemic—but I won’t write out the depressing list, you already know it), we are at a possible crossroad. I won’t use the word opportunity, and I won’t use the word hope. They are too limp. Both allow avoidance and denial. I’m going to go with reset and refresh, both personally and as a species, because these words require planning, dialogue, boots on the ground, in other words, work. Two extraordinary novels that take readers from a harrowing place of seemingly no escape to a new vision, using gritty and detailed dialogue and action, are Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.