These Days Are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown

An intimate portrait in which moments of pandemic grief and anxiety are always matched by humour, tenderness, and curiosity. Saleema Nawaz, author of Songs for the End of the World

It’s shocking how much the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic feel like ancient history. In these near-daily dispatches from the lockdown era, Rosenblum attempts to pin herself to the earth during a moment of global unmooring. In doing so, she provides an honest and very human accounting of a time that is already being erased from our collective memories. Nathan Whitlock, author of Lump

In early March 2020, as the first wave of the pandemic closed in and big city life shifted in estranging ways, Rebecca Rosenblum began to chronicle the changes in herself and others in journal entries on social media. As we acquired new vocabulary, adjusted to new routines, and learned to cope with losses of all kinds, she probed personal and collective anxieties and conundrums. During walks through a deserted city, she conceived of herself as an eye, but she was also the beating heart of a community trying to finds its way during a collective trauma. In compilation, this diary is a record of where we’ve been and who we’ve been under unknowable and stressful circumstances. To read These Days Are Numbered is to witness a deeply curious, compassionate, and humane mind at work. Christine Fischer Guy, author of The Umbrella Mender

Rosenblum is an absolute master of tapping into human emotions and relationships, and her observations into human nature, while so very insightful, are also so extremely kind and lovely. The Minerva Reader