I came across a very eye catching bright red ARC of a book not due out until Spring 2021. So mindless scrolling on Twitter was all I could focus on. What I didn’t realise (aah, hindsight!) was that I needed a big, powerhouse of a book to slap my brain around with, get it out of slump-mode using good old fashioned brute force. My eyes were seeing the words, my brain was somewhere else entirely.
I thought I wanted gently calming and quiet reads, but they were just not cutting it. My concentration is at record rock bottom levels and I’m yearning for a book to take me away from this shitshow. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and I’ve attempted to read just 2 books in as many weeks and couldn’t finish either of them. It’s August 2020 and I’m sat on my sofa in the searing heat. It's a Five Star Book of the Year for me! It delves deeply into what it takes to survive yet it’s also a heart-wrenching exploration of grief, bringing to life the all too raw poignancy as we consider what we’ve lost and what may be changed irrevocably. The End Of Men is a brilliantly written story of humanity. Spanning years and told by a kaleidoscope of distinct narrative voices Which just serves to demonstrate quite how timely this book is.
I think as a result, whilst reading I was a little less terrified than I would’ve been, and maybe it seemed less like fiction and something that could be in the daily news. Are there parallels? Yes, undoubtably, because a virus that takes over the world in a matter of weeks is something that is now much more of a reality than many of us ever thought. Written a few years before the situation we now find ourselves in, it’s surely a quirk of fate that it will be published in a time we are, hopefully, rebuilding our lives.ĭid I read it differently to how I would of a year ago? Yes. The End Of Men is a book that would always have appealed to me, even before I was living through a global pandemic.
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