Written during the early months of lockdown, INTIMATIONS explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality --- or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened --- and what should come next.

Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, it embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on “Top of the Pops,” the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68. David Mitchell’s novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper; of music, madness and idealism. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us?

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or should --- she was the girl of their dreams four decades earlier, the girl with the cello in George's pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin --- pint after pint, pub after pub --- so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland: his first encounter with Faye, the lively woman who would become his wife; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

On the day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity --- he correctly forecast every outcome of the 2008 election --- Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. His first assignment for the Interviewer is a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, known to Sam for the sentimental works of baseball lore that first sparked his love of the game. When Sam meets Frank at Citi Field for the Mets’ home opener, he finds himself unexpectedly ushered into Doyle’s crumbling family empire. While their lives seem inextricable, none of them know how close they are to losing everything, including each other.

In SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after 20 years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

At an internment camp in Indonesia, 47 people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When microbiologist and epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city. A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare. Already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic.

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell's heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan's office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan's elegance, success and spiritual force. Surrounded by Nell's ex, her best friend, her best friend's boyfriend and Joan's buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.

After four decades of what he believes to be a happy, healthy partnership, Hugo Gardner's world is overturned when he learns that his wife, Valerie, is not only requesting a divorce but has left him for a younger, more vital man. Hugo, an octogenarian political writer and retired journalist for Time, must rethink the way he's lived, and reassess how he'd like to spend his remaining years. With an ominous oncologist's report hanging over his head, Hugo decides to get away for a bit, to a conference in Paris. A new romance blooms there, and Hugo finds himself wondering if growing old in Paris might be the perfect antidote to the drama he left behind in New York.

Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to "Hell and High Water," the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink --- she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction --- but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows.