Narrative fiction is an important medium for providing counter-narratives that challenge and make visible culturally dominant narratives. This chapter explores the dynamics of master and counter-narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of narrative fiction. It looks at how the heroic narrative of battle and narratives of ‘we are all in the same boat’ have dominated public discourse and how these narratives create an illusion of control by attributing agency to patients, health workers, and the public as a whole. The chapter then focuses on two counter-narratives that question a false sense of agency, Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea (2022). Analysing these novels from the perspective of the three dimensions of narrative agency—narrative awareness, narrative imagination, and narrative dialogicality—the chapter suggests that they problematise heroic narratives of battle by emphasising the socially situated complexity of the lived experience of the pandemic.