Notes from an Apocalypse

We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Our old postwar alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How do we live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does the world hold for our children? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what is anybody doing about it?

Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell (“wryly humorous, cogently insightful”—NPR) is possessed by these questions. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. And he bears witness to those places the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he offers a unique window into our apocalyptic imagination.

Part tour, part pilgrimage, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting and hopeful meditation on our alarming present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O’Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn’t the end of the world?

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