Recommendations from our site
“This is a really interesting book. It had quite an unconventional publishing journey, but it became something of a cult hit. It’s not a traditional post-apocalyptic book, but it tells the story of an excommunicated knight turned brigand. He comes into the company of a young girl who might be a saint, and they travel through medieval France during the Black Death. The whole book is like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You have a chaotic, magical disintegration of the world, which everyone is absolutely sure is the end of days. We, the readers, know it is just a plague, that things are going to continue. But the characters feel like everyone is going to die: the end of the world has come.” Read more...
The best books on The End of the World
Paul Cooper, Historian
“It’s about a man called Thomas. He’s wounded at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, part of the Hundred Years’ War. And he gets an arrow in the face – in his jaw. During the course of his convalescence, he’s divested of all his land holdings by a rogue lord. So he resorts to a life of brigandage and is pillaging the countryside, when he comes across this young girl… The band of brigands, they’re going to do awful things to her, so he kills all of them and saves her; and she says, ‘I need to get to Avignon’ – where the Pope was based at that time. So he ends up taking her across France…It’s a brilliant, brilliant book. And I just hadn’t heard of it. I was utterly enthralled; it was one of the best books I’ve ever read.” Read more...
