It’s been almost exactly a month since The Times, responding to coronavirus concerns, began to implement work-from-home rules: tentative and voluntary ones at first; then, in short order, urgent and mandatory ones. In the ensuing weeks the Books desk has become many desks, in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, in Indiana and West Virginia and Southern California, all of us hunkered down with our families and roommates and pets, and our books. Sometimes we post photos in Slack of the local trees starting to bud. Sometimes we ask for or offer advice about grocery deliveries. Always, we continue to read and assign reviews and cover the world of books; and once a week, we convene in the cloud to assemble the latest issue of the Book Review and offer you suggestions about what to read next.

How about a novel of New York, in solidarity with its hard-hit residents? N. K. Jemisin’s “The City We Became” celebrates the diversity and resilience of the five boroughs, in a fantasy story that feels just right for this moment. Or Samantha Irby’s laugh-out-loud essays in “Wow, No Thank You,” many of them about anxiety and life indoors? Even poetry can put you in touch with the doomsday mood, as Alice Notley proves in her playful new collection, “For the Ride.”

But maybe you want to take your eyes off the slow-rolling apocalypse, and worry about the same things you used to worry about in the Time Before. In that case two fascinating new books will get you thinking about mental illness — Robert Kolker’s “Hidden Valley Road” and Anthony David’s “Into the Abyss” — while four others (from Susan J. Douglas, Dionne Searcey, Hossein Kamaly and Fernanda Melchor) all approach questions of feminism and women’s lives from different angles: an “accidental theme,” as Pamela Paul put it when we closed the issue. Sometimes things just come together, even when we’re all apart.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker. (Doubleday, $29.95.) Between 1945 and 1965, 12 children were born to the Galvin family of Colorado Springs, Colo. Six of them developed schizophrenia. Kolker recounts the family’s tragic story and relates the efforts of the scientists who struggled to make sense of it. His book is a “feat of empathy and narrative journalism,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Having just one schizophrenic family member is bound to reorient the experiences of everyone else; having six made the Galvins extraordinary, not least to the medical researchers who eventually studied them.”