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Everything Must Go review: A fascinating guide to the apocalypse

From the Book of Revelation to extinction fiction, we just love end times. A new guide by Dorian Lynskey is full of gems

By Bethan Ackerley

10 April 2024

2A1MK33 OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - SEPTEMBER 27, 2019: Thousands of people gather and march towards Parliament Hill as part of a global climate strike protest. — Our fascination with end times might be partly down to one of our many cognitive biases
Colin Temple/Alamy

Everything Must Go
Dorian Lynskey (Picador, UK; Pantheon, US, November 2024)

To the surprise of almost no one, the big winner at the Academy Awards last month was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb. The film’s success speaks to our age-old obsession with end times. Be it fire, flood or pestilence, humanity has always fantasised about its doom.

In Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of…

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