Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

Books

"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell" -Jenny Offill "Fascinating...Oddly uplifting" -The Economist "Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich" -Wall Street Journal By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense-and coming to grips with the future We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children-nothing if not an act of hope-in such unsettled times? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions-and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he ...