Notes from an Apocalypse | Granta

  • Published: 19/03/2020
  • ISBN: 9781783784080
  • Granta Books
  • 272 pages

Notes from an Apocalypse

Mark O'Connell

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

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.

Extraordinarily good-insightful, affecting, funny, and appropriately terrifying. The perfect handbook for the end times. Mark O'Connell is a truly brilliant writer and Notes from an Apocalypse could hardly be more incisive, or more timely

Sally Rooney

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

Riveting, fascinating, comic and appalling... O'Connell is a charming guide

Scotsman

The Author

Mark O’Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. His first book, To Be a Machine, won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he became the first ever non-fiction writer to win the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book, Notes From an Apocalypse was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books, and his work has appeared in theNew Yorker.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Mark O'Connell on Granta.com

Granta Books Writing | Granta Books

In Conversation

Jenny Offill & Mark O'Connell

‘This isn’t the end of the world. It’s history going about its business. This isn’t the last apocalypse by a long shot.’

Jenny Offill, author of Weather, talks to Mark O’Connell, author of Notes from the Apocalypse.