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The End

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The End

By: Luke Allan
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“To say I have a memory like a sieve would be an insult to sieves. I have a memory like a basketball filled with glue. I have a memory like a plastic croissant on a windowsill that someone is pointing to and saying, it looks so real.”

In this exquisite, darkly comic debut, we meet a poet looking around at a life he can’t remember how to live. Surrounded by books, he now finds reading unbearable; stories no longer make sense. He has renounced the internet, elevators, television. He is convinced he is dying. He walks wrong-footed and map-less through Italy, Iowa and Iceland, his sense of time collapsed.

The End unravels into a deeply personal double eulogy: for books, and the good life they promised, but also for the author’s mother – a former librarian – whose death has overwritten his world with unanswered questions. How do we tell the story of a loved one’s life if they have chosen to end it? And how can we make sense of our own, derailed by mourning?

As the days break and the poet reckons with these two losses, he slowly finds new ways to inhabit a world grief has toppled, rediscovering meaning, mystery and gratitude – both for what was, and what remains.

© Luke Allan 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

Art & Literature Authors Grief & Loss Personal Development Poetry Relationships
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Critics' reviews

Once in a while a book comes along and reconfigures how you see the world. Luke Allan’s The End is such a book. A work of both profound and painfully hilarious genius, it will change you (Maggie O’Farrell)
Mesmerising, radically honest and heartbreaking. I love this book. I’m grateful to be in the world with a writer who can articulate something this hard with this much grace. Miraculously, it’s also painfully, life-affirmingly funny. I guess because real compassion and real laughter connect us in exactly the same way. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read (Luke Kennard)
A treasure… this strange, funny, beautiful book asks what books are for and shows us (Elisa Gabbert)
The End is a marvel – absurdly clever, simultaneously sad and funny, poetic yet light on its feet. I've been recommending it to everyone. (Martha Sprackland)
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