About the Book
A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go.
'Brilliant, scholarly, sharp and witty’ – Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
'Will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' – The Spectator
For two millennia, Christians have anticipated the end of the world, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation. But over the past two centuries, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might be annihilated.
In Everything Must Go – a cultural history of the modern world that weaves together politics, history, science, high and popular culture – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched, while perched on the edge of our seats with eyes wide, (mostly) loving every moment.
Whether with visions of destruction by nuclear holocaust or a mighty collision with a meteor, a devastating epidemic or a violent takeover by robots, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more?
Deeply illuminating about our past, our present and – given the revelation that the end of the world has seemingly always been nigh – hopeful about our future, Everything Must Go will grip you from beginning to, well, end.
'I was blown away by this book' – Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound' – Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't
About the Author :
Dorian Lynskey has written about music, politics, film and books for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, The i Paper, BBC Culture, GQ, MOJO, Empire, Billboard, The New Statesman, The Spectator, the Los Angeles Times and Literary Review. He is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011), Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), which was longlisted for both the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize. He co-hosts the hit podcasts Origin Story and Oh God, What Now? and has co-written three Origin Story books (Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory, all 2024) with his co-host Ian Dunt. He is on the editorial board of George Orwell Studies and is one of the judges for the Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Award.
Review :
Clever and voluminous . . . So engagingly plotted and written that it’s a pleasure to bask in its constant stream of remarkable titbits and illuminating insights.
Everything Must Go will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant.
Lynskey has a journalist’s eye for a great story and a killer quotation . . . He is ridiculously well informed.
Lynskey's encyclopedic knowledge . . . and his glee at the sheer inventiveness of the doomsayers' creations, make this an unlikely page-turner . . . a curiously entertaining read.
A fascinating guide . . . full of lesser-known cultural gems.
Terrifically entertaining
Clever and insightful
Doom without the gloom . . . the book's own stock of revelations never runs short
We keep having conversations these days about how it feels like the End Times . . . turns out, we've ALWAYS felt it's the End Times. I cannot recommend Dorian Lynskey’s book enough. For a book about Armageddon, it's very uplifting.
A rich and remarkable book
I was blown away by this book. The staggering range of references, the razor-sharp analysis, the wisdom, left me gasping out loud at times. Lynskey also somehow manages to make a book about the end of the world feel . . . hopeful. One of the best non-fiction writers around.
So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end – the world, or the book.
A major piece of work, [a] heavyweight yet fleet-of-foot look at humankind’s fixation on the end of days, told through the prism of history, religion, literature, popular art, science and more, as compelling as it is authoritative.
Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound. You’ll never see humanity the same way again.
For a book drenched in destruction, Everything Must Go is not depressing, and often wryly funny. It is incredibly deeply researched, fluently written, moving deftly between close-up detail and broad-brush analysis.
