Everything Must Go: Why We Are Obsessed With the End of the World

A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the HBO’s The Last of Us.

'Will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' – The Spectator

'Clever and voluminous . . . So engagingly plotted and written’ – The Guardian

We have always told ourselves stories about the end of the world. Long before we watched superintelligent AI wage war on humanity in The Terminator, or read about a catastrophic deluge in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, art, literature and politics were all haunted by recurring visions of apocalypse.

In Everything Must Go – a colourful, witty and stirring cultural history of the modern world that weaves in politics, history and science – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan and planet-shattering movie blockbusters.

Whether we’re fantasizing about nuclear holocaust or a collision with an asteroid, a devastating pandemic or a robot revolution, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more? And how do fictional premonitions of the end play into real-life responses to existential threats?

Deeply illuminating about our past and our present, and surprisingly 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