A Brief History of the End of the World

3,000 years of unfulfilled apocalypses, postponed judgement days, and cancelled doomsday predictions in a new book from the author of the bestseller Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

Do you feel like we are living at the end of history? Does it seem like everything is on fire and one disaster follows another? Here's a little comfort: you're not the first to feel this way. If there is one thing that people throughout history agree on, it is the conviction that the world will not last much longer.

This book is about the apocalypse and how people have always believed it was very near. Over thousands of years, we'll encounter strange cults, failed prophets and mass panic, holy warriors leading uprisings in anticipation of the final days, and suburbanites waiting for aliens to rescue them from a doomed planet Earth. We'll return to a time when the world was grappling with a pandemic and a climate crisis at the same time. And we'll look into the future to ask the disturbing question: how will it all end?

But this is also a book about living in a world where the threat of disaster always looms – whether it's a madman with a nuclear button or the slow collapse of the environment. Because when we talk about the end of the world, we mean the end of our world. Our obsession with doomsday is really about change: our fear of it, our desire for it, and how we can ultimately find hope in it.