Notes from an Apocalypse

From the prize-winning author of To Be a Machine - meet the men and women preparing for the end of the world

"Extraordinarily good-insightful, affecting, funny, and appropriately terrifying. The perfect handbook for the end times... Notes from an Apocalypse could hardly be more incisive, or more timely" Sally Rooney

"Harrowing, tender-hearted and funny as hell. O'Connell proves himself to be a genius guide through all the circles of imagined and anticipated doom. Read it, then immediately buy a copy for your "but what's the worst that could happen?" friend'" Jenny Offill

In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota and in the lush valleys of New Zealand, small groups of determined men and women are getting ready.

They are environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate change; billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars; and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilization as we know it.

Not unconcerned himself by the possibility of the end of days, Mark O'Connell set out to meet them.

"Anyone with open eyes lives today bound by apocalyptic fears for the future and the maddening same-ness that defines the present day. Notes from an Apocalypse is a penetrating investigation into that new uncanny, which shapes both our collective indifference and our climate rage" David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth