Fourteen Days

By: Margaret Atwood - editor, Douglas Preston - editor

Narrated by: Shayna Small

Brought to you by Penguin.

A BBC, Financial Times and Cosmopolitan What to Read in 2024 pick

Set in a New York apartment building, Fourteen Days is an irresistibly propulsive novel with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of neighbours has been secretly written by a different, major literary voice - from Margaret Atwood and John Grisham to Emma Donoghue and Celeste Ng.

One week into lockdown, the tenants of a run-down apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop each evening and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants – some of whom have barely spoken to each other before now – become real neighbours.

A dazzling, heartwarming and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days is an ode to the power of storytelling and human connection.

Includes writing from: Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Jennine Capo Crucet, Pat Cummings, Joseph Cassara, Angie Cruz, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Doug Preston, Alice Randall, Caroline Randall, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, DeShawn Charles Winslow, Meg Wolitzer

© ed. Margaret Atwood 2023 (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

An immensely enjoyable product of an immensely unenjoyable time, Fourteen Days is lively, freewheeling and…an impressive achievement

Fourteen Days serves as a valuable reminder that stories can teach, console, provide a place of acceptance and perhaps even change their readers (or listeners)

We like a bit of fun with our fiction, of the sort you get with Fourteen Days, a new collaborative novel set in a New York tenement in the early days of the pandemic in which a crew of acclaimed writers — including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham and Emma Donoghue — each tell a different character’s story.

A fascinating story of the ‘left-behinds’… a literary event not quite like any other

A rather intriguing puzzle box of a book… enjoyable, and has a dip-into-able quality

If you want to feel well read in double-quick time, try Fourteen Days, which is set in a New York city tenement in the early days of the pandemic. It has a novel twist (pardon the pun) - each character has been secretly written by a different author from Margaret Atwood and John Grisham to Dave Eggers and Celeste Ng

A fun, compelling game of literary who’s who

This “collaborative novel” unites writers including Celeste Ng, John Grisham and Emma Donoghue for a story set in a New York apartment building during — surprise! — Covid-19. Framed as an ode to the people who couldn’t escape the city, there’s a twist: it’s deliberately unclear who wrote what

While we're really not in a rush to think about the pandemic again, we'll make an exception for Margaret Atwood. Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel edited by Atwood and Douglas Preston, and includes writing from Celeste NG and John Grisham, amongst others. In the novel, the inhabitants of a Manhattan apartment block gather on the roof and tell stories, as more neighbours join people start to form real bonds

The novel works brilliantly, partly because of the simplicity of its premise… this is a bold, imaginative idea, superbly executed