Here are five things that lifted and lengthened me during lockdown, and in the months since.

Bloomin‘ bird

“It must be weird to have wings, and not be able to fly.” Penguin Bloom (the movie) is a tear jerker. Naomi Watts plays a devastating Sam Bloom, mother of three, who becomes paralysed from the chest down. How Penguin, the injured magpie, helps build back Sam’s family’s emotional bonds is delightful. Sam’s kayak trainer Gaye (Kiwi actor Rachel House) reconnects her with her strong, sporty body and iron will to succeed. Actors Andrew Lincoln, Jackie Weaver and Griffin Murray-Johnston are also draw cards.

Fly away

“He wore pale suits and his hair was fine and puffy, hair-net brown.” Joan London’s superb novels Gilgamesh  and The Good Parents helped me shake off the COVID lockdown I endured over Christmas because I’d been at the Strawberry Hills hotel at the same time as someone with COVID. London knows how to create compelling characters and Maya’s parents Toni and Jacob from The Good Parents and Edith and Leopold from Gilgamesh are prime examples. You just have to keep reading to learn their fates. Great lockdown literature.

Holiday reading?

“It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.” Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alum is the chilling story of a summer holiday gone wrong. But what, exactly, is the disaster? That these two American families – one white, one black – can’t connect with the outside world, or that they were already living in a disaster-driven world, which is neither a good nor sustainable way to live? The interplay of fear, suspicion and powerlessness make this a tense page turner.

Chess quest

“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard. The next day her picture appeared in the Herald-Leader.” In The Queen’s Gambit (novel) by Walter Tevis, Beth is orphaned at 8 and sent to live in Methuen Home in Kentucky, where she convinces the janitor to teach her how to play chess. Beth yearns to be a grandmaster and her rise through the ranks is glorious to watch. Her addictive personality threatens to break her and the male champions terrify as they close ranks. Can she outplay them?

Hung out to dry

“Deborah panicked: ‘We gon die, we gon die.’” Sarah M. Broom’s brilliant memoir The Yellow House shows how she, her 11 siblings and her mother responded when Hurricane Katrina rendered their yellow house in East New Orleans uninhabitable. Broom and her siblings fought for their mother’s ownership/recompense but got shunted around for years by lawyers and bureaucrats. Both intimate family portrait and story of gentrification, migration and displacement, the book also reveals a bleaker side of the “birthplace of jazz” that has mostly been masked by mythology.