"A few weeks before quarantine, our family rented a cabin overlooking the McKenzie River. I brought with me Han Kang's The White Book. Kang's The Vegetarian is on my list of 'favourite' books, near the top. The White Book is more associative and fragmented than its stunning predecessor — it's as much a collection of poetry as a novel.

"The narrator's sister died before she was born, leaving a long shadow of survivor's guilt, a palpable ghost. Like the time we find ourselves in now, there is no narrative. There is no plot, save for what you assemble in your mind.

"Each section offers a meditation on something white, on grief, on a memory. Small white pills; sugar cubes; the 'powdered bones' of her mother's ashes. Most take up no more than half a page — the book itself is mostly whiteness.

"I read it in stolen moments, 160 pages in seven weeks. I finished it one afternoon while my daughter played in the bath, milky with soap. How exciting a sugar cube must have been, the first time she tasted it. How exciting, the first time she saw snow. But, for now, in quarantine, all we can do is daydream — like reading, a pastime about lives never lived.

"I sit and wait for 'our lives' miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air."