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Sebastian Ritscher
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THE END OF THE WORLD HOUSE

Adrienne Celt

A comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them.
Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a large Silicon Valley tech firm where her job is to draw the company's ubiquitous dinosaur logo day in and day out in an attempt to put a friendly face on capitalism. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

When the novel opens, Bertie and Kate - and the rest of the world - have been living amidst a series of global catastrophes ranging from geopolitical to environmental, and the result is that infrastructure is collapsing and travel for pleasure is virtually nonexistent. To distract themselves from the pain of their upcoming separation, the pair decides to take an impulsive trip to Paris as a sort of last hurrah before vacationing is completely a thing of the past.

In Paris, they are offered a private tour of the Louvre by an enigmatic stranger. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything. In order to make her way back to Kate, Bertie has to figure out how much control she has over her future - and her past - and how to survive an apocalypse when the world keeps refusing to end.

Adrienne Celt is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two previous novels: Invitation to a Bonfire, currently being adapted for TV by AMC, and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Adrienne is also a cartoonist, and she publishes a weekly webcomic at LoveAmongtheLampreys.com.
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Published 2022-04-19 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

An enjoyably mind-bending trip through an all-too-realistic depiction of the breakdown of society, Bertie's unexpected journey explores the power of relationships to shape our reality.

Adrienne Celt's new novel depicts a fraying world (climate crisis, political violence, social upheaval) that's frighteningly recognizable. It's a timely novel, as well as one that has great fun exploring what time itself is. Yet End of the World House asks a question that's timeless: how do we make a meaningful life?

Adrienne Celt has crafted something brilliant with End of the World House. This book is an intoxicating mix of beauty, art, and mystery. Celt writes about the tangled threads of close friendship with tremendous skill and a wild amount of heart. It's a novel that's undeniably funny, unafraid to look at the messy ways we unwittingly complicate our lives as well as the lives of the people closest to us. A compelling look at intimacy and its myriad vulnerabilities, End of the World House is a stunner.

Truehearted and affecting

Exhilarating.... This book about love, friendship, and the cruel nature of time is catnip for fans of Groundhog Day and Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind.

Mystery, time-travel, and love at the end of the world. What more could you want?

[r]eading Adrienne Celt is like being granted access to a secret kingdom, another layer of reality you didn't know existed. Even mundane objects shimmer strangely under the intensity of her gaze. Haunted, romantic, unexpectedly playful, and un-put-down-able, END OF THE WORLD HOUSE will change the way you think about the immortality of art, free will, the future and the past. Adrienne Celt is brilliant and I want to read everything she ever writes.

A phantasmagoric thrill ride, Adrienne Celt's End of The World House is a story of apocalypse and art, but also of friendship and love and fighting for a sense of one's self in the face of modern day alienation and precarity. I love this book for the way it reconsiders how time and space function within novels, how it made me think about memory and art-making, and also, for its acuity and its heart.