I know, you’ve heard it a lot lately, but: Things are starting to feel awfully unsettling, aren’t they? If you find yourself stuck at home in the midst of a viral pandemic, recovering or just secluding yourself for the sake of individual preservation, you might want to curl up with a book — the best kind of social distancing there is, according to four out of five members of my family. One possibility: something from this list of epidemic-themed novels we’ve compiled. But if that’s a little too close to the bone, we bring you a wider array of choices below, from the conclusion of Hilary Mantel’s wonderful Wolf Hall trilogy, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, to a journalist’s account of his efforts to shine light on long-unsolved race crimes, to Brian Greene’s cosmological contemplations in “Until the End of Time.” (Talk about close to the bone.) Libraries and bookstores may be temporarily closing their doors where you are — they are, where I am — but e-books and mail order are still available, and just as effective at helping you turn your mind to something else for a while. Be safe, be well, and keep reading.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

FIEBRE TROPICAL, by Juli Delgado Lopera. (The Feminist Press, paper, $17.95.) This bold and energetic first novel is narrated by Francisca, a 15-year-old who has relocated from Colombia to Miami, where three generations of her family are crowded into her grandmother’s ant-infested apartment. Francisca is bilingual, God-bothered and sexually confused, with strong feelings for the girl who leads her religious youth group. “The prose is as ebullient and assertive as Rosie Perez’s shadowboxing in the opening credits of ‘Do the Right Thing,’” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “You can open this novel anywhere and find sunbeams, the signs of a writer who is grinding their own colors.”

THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, by Hilary Mantel. (Holt, $30.) For more than a decade, Mantel has immersed her readers in the life of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII and architect of the English Reformation. When this concluding volume of a trilogy begins, Cromwell has never been more beloved to the king, who is now free to marry the docile Jane Seymour. It is the beginning of Cromwell’s undoing. “This is not a younger man’s book, not a book of striving,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “It is a novel of late middle age, a novel of preserving what one has seized — of fighting off young, hungry men who remind you of yourself, who will use your own methods against you. Above all, it is a novel of living with the dead. Mantel names the deceased in her dramatis personae at the beginning of her books; how that list has grown.”

REBEL CINDERELLA: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, by Adam Hochschild. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) Rose Pastor was an impoverished Jewish immigrant from Russia who started working in a cigar factory at the age of 11. When she was 26, in 1905, she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, the scion of an old-money Episcopalian family. The couple became active members in the Socialist Party, lending their support to a labor movement under siege during a time of widening inequality. In “Rebel Cinderella,” the acclaimed historian Adam Hochschild “writes movingly about an unlikely pair who also served as a potent symbol,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “The time of upheaval that he writes about bears an unnerving resemblance to our own.”