Virginia Woolf began The Years, the last book she published in her lifetime, with the weather. “It was an uncertain spring,” Woolf wrote, and Sigrid Nunez uses the very same words to open her ninth novel, The Vulnerables. Here, the spring in question is that of 2020, and the narrator is suddenly “coming across words that would soon be overfamiliar – Wuhan, wet market, lockdown, quarantine”.