Occupational hazards abound for Jay, the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Blue Ruin. We meet him in 2020, in the early days of Covid, as he delivers groceries in upstate New York. He has already contracted the virus and is suffering from its aftereffects—his breathing is labored, his heart fragile—and when he pulls up to a house to make a delivery, he realizes that one of the customers is his ex-girlfriend Alice, whom Jay hasn’t seen since she left him for his best friend decades ago in England. As he carries her packages to the porch, his weakened body gives out. Alice watches him collapse in front of the car, which has also been, for some time, Jay’s home. Though the property, which turns out to be a vast estate belonging to an absent billionaire, is supposed to be closed to visitors, Alice takes him to a barn on the grounds where he can recover in secret.
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