This chapter addresses the position of British authors from black and Asian communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Beginning with a reading of Fred D’Aguiar’s Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 (2021), an account of D’Aguiar’s being diagnosed with prostate cancer during the pandemic, it explores how D’Aguiar expounds a metaphorical connection between cancer and the history of slavery, a congruence in which slavery is positioned as a blight on human equality in the past that has significant repercussions in the present. It then goes on to analyse Hari Kunzru’s 2024 novel Blue Ruin in the context of the period since Britain’s deindustrialisation, when the creative industries have been used to make a major contribution to Britain’s economic base and hence compensate the economy for the loss of heavy industry. In Kunzru’s novel this agenda is complicated by considerations of race during the pandemic because his protagonist is a bi-racial artist who has opted out of the programme to galvanise the economy through participation in the creative industries, thus gesturing towards a form of cultural production that cannot be made to cohere with the development of national recovery from either the historical experience of deindustrialisation or the more recent experience of lockdown. Finally, through a reading of Cecile Pin’s 2023 novel Wandering Souls the chapter shows how the experience of Vietnamese migrants to Britain in the wake of the Vietnam War subsequently encompassed their experiences during Covid-19 in a way that made the pandemic seem relatively minor compared to the enormity of the earlier war and thus enables a narrative of survival.