I went with my husband to the Lake Placid Ironman. Serenata’s husband, Remington, takes up extreme exercise late in life, and enters a “ Mettleman ” triathlon. There’s the feeling of being punished for having been good the first intimations of limitation. But like Serenata I have drastically arthritic knees. I’ve always been an exercise nut, so in some ways this is putting that under the microscope. Was there a specific trigger for this novel? Something that set you off? That’s a big subject and I don’t mind visiting it more than once. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the relationship between mind and body, and the weirdness of living in an organism that’s in the process of corruption and, ultimately, death. Big Brother was about food and people’s relationship to it. Your novel Big Brother was about obesity. We feel like we’re in a disaster movie, only we’re on the wrong side of the screen and there’ll be no happy endings for our favourite characters.

The possibility of catastrophe is stimulating to the imagination, though I worry this is potentially catastrophic on a scale that’s bigger than anything I could make up – and I don’t mean the disease itself, but everything that follows economically. What are these weeks of seclusion and anxiety going to do for art?Ĭataclysm is always good for the arts. But it’s two years’ work, and I’m publishing into a big, black hole all the bookshops closed. I’m ashamed of myself because I’m not supposed to care about what’s happening to my book it’s nothing compared to losing a business you’ve spent your whole life building. How do you feel about your new novel being published during this time?

Lionel shriver should we stay review