Until the End of Time

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The CorrectionsIn The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigour to the themes – both human and literary – that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we’ve come to expect from Franzen.Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative and necessary.

A race against time The year is 2025. Mankind is under threat. A fight for their lives Men are dying, but women remain safe. As the sickness spreads to every corner of the globe, people fight to protect the men they love against all odds. A disaster like no other Can they find a cure before it's too late? Will this be the story of the end of the world - or its salvation? Compelling and devastating, The End of Men is the pulse-pounding thriller everyone is talking about.

A race against timeThe year is 2025. Mankind is under threat.A fight for their livesMen are dying, but women remain safe. As the sickness spreads to every corner of the globe, people fight to protect the men they love against all odds.A disaster like no otherCan they find a cure before it's too late? Will this be the story of the end of the world - or its salvation?Compelling and devastating, The End of Men is the pulse-pounding thriller everyone is talking about.

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love , Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one’s will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down “unloving.” While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and “unloving.” The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism which is characterized by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex. The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism.

‘A FIERCELY INTELLIGENT PAGE-TURNER…AT ONCE THOUGHTFUL AND HIGHLY EMOTIVE’ PAULA HAWKINS‘THE STUFF THAT CLASSICS ARE MADE OF’ AJ FINN‘BRILLIANT, PRESCIENT, UNPUTDOWNABLE’ JENNY COLGAN‘A TOUR DE FORCE – A FEMINIST REIMAGINING OF SOCIETY’ GILLIAN MCALLISTERGlasgow, 2025. Dr Amanda Maclean is called to treat a patient with flu-like symptoms. Within three hours he is dead. This is how it begins. The unknown virus sweeps through the hospital with deadly speed.The victims are all men. Dr Maclean raises the alarm. But by the time the authorities listen to her, the virus has spread to every corner of the world. Threatening families. Governments. Countries.Can they find a cure before it’s too late? Can they stopTHE END OF MEN?‘A POWERFUL, GRIPPING BOOK THAT HAS MADE ME FEEL A LITTLE BIT BETTER ABOUT THE WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN RIGHT NOW’ BRYONY GORDON‘COMPELLING AND HEART-BREAKING. A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT’ ABI DAR?‘MOVING, THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND TERRIFYINGLY PRESCIENT’ TAMMY COHEN‘DEVASTATING, PRESCIENT, COMPELLING AND CONFRONTING’ LAURA JANE WILLIAMS‘TOPICAL, TIMELY, IMAGINATIVE AND ULTIMATELY HOPEFUL’ KATIE KHAN, AUTHOR OF HOLD BACK THE STARS'AN INCREDIBLE ACHIEVEMENT – BOTH A BREATH-TAKING FEAT OF IMAGINATION AND A WISE, STEADY EYE ON THE WORLD AS IT IS' JESSICA MOOR, AUTHOR OF THE KEEPER

In THE END OF THE WORLD RUNNING CLUB Edgar Hill ran 550 miles after an apocalypse to try and find his family. He had it easy. This is his wife’s story. Beth Hill has survived the apocalypse with a baby and toddler in tow. And what’s more she’s done it alone - without her husband’s help. He’s never been any help. But when disaster strikes and someone steals her kids, she knows what she has to do. The new world might be very different: no government, no law, no infrastructure and a whole lot more ocean than there used to be. But one thing hasn’t changed - the lengths a mother will go to save her family…

In THE END OF THE WORLD RUNNING CLUB Edgar Hill ran 550 miles after an apocalypse to try and find his family. He had it easy. This is his wife’s story. Beth Hill has survived the apocalypse with a baby and toddler in tow. And what’s more she’s done it alone - without her husband’s help. He’s never been any help. But when disaster strikes and someone steals her kids, she knows what she has to do. The new world might be very different: no government, no law, no infrastructure and a whole lot more ocean than there used to be. But one thing hasn’t changed - the lengths a mother will go to save her family…

As capitalism triumphs on the ruins of utopias and faith in progress fades, revolts are breaking out everywhere. From London to Hong Kong and from Buenos Aires to Beirut, protests flare up, in some cases spreading like wildfire, in other cases petering out and reigniting elsewhere. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop them: as many were reflecting on the loss of public space, the fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis with the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are living in an age of revolt. But what is revolt? It would be a mistake to think of it as simply an explosion of anger, a spontaneous and irrational outburst, as it is often portrayed in the media. Exploding anger is not a bolt from the blue but a symptom of a social order in which the sovereignty of the state has imposed itself as the sole condition of order. Revolt challenges the sovereignty of the state, whether it is democratic or despotic, exposing the violence that underpins it. Revolt upsets the agenda of power, interrupts time, throws history into disarray. The time of revolt, discontinuous and intermittent, is also a revolt of time, an anarchic transition to a space of time that disengages itself from the architecture of politics. This brilliant reflection on the nature and significance of revolt will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy and to anyone concerned with the key questions of politics today.

Can a ghost from the future save a life in the past? A chilling tale of dark forces and revenge…The ghost turns up one summer day, alone in a world she once knew, among people who were once her family. She knows she is one of four sisters, but which one? She can be sure of only one thing – that there's been an accident.As she struggles to find her identity, she becomes aware of a malevolent force stirring around her. Something terrible is about to happen. One of the sisters will die – unless the ghost can use the future to reshape the past. But how can she warn them, when they don't even know she exists?

The critical situation in which our planet finds itself is no longer in doubt. Some things are already collapsing while others are beginning to do so, increasing the possibility of a global catastrophe that would mean the end of the world as we know it. As individuals, we are faced with a daily deluge of bad news about the worsening situation, preparing ourselves to live with years of deep uncertainty about the future of the planet and the species that inhabit it, including our own. How can we cope? How can we project ourselves beyond the present, think bigger and find ways not just to survive the collapse but to live it? In this book, the sequel to  How Everything Can Collapse , the authors show that a change of course necessarily requires an inner journey and a radical rethinking of our vision of the world. Together these might enable us to remain standing during the coming storm, to develop a new awareness of ourselves and of the world and to imagine new ways of living in it. Perhaps then it will be possible to regenerate life from the ruins, creating new alliances in differing directions – with ourselves and our inner nature, between humans, with other living beings and with the earth on which we dwell.