A lyrical and devastatingly funny meditation on books, grief, and language

I have come to the realization—finally!—that I hate reading, and that I have always hated reading but have pretended to like it for social reasons. Now I see clearly. Books are stuffy and ludicrous. Full of quotations of other books, and people saying simple things in confusing ways because they want to be loved but aren’t sure how.

In Luke Allan’s exquisite, darkly comic debut, we meet a poet looking around at a life he can’t remember how to live. He walks wrong-footed and map-less through Italy, Iowa, and Iceland, his sense of time collapsed. Reading, once a pleasure and a foothold, has become intolerable. Books are stuffy and ludicrous, and grief renders absurd what was once a way to make sense of the world.

Unfolding in fragments and following a delightful associative logic, The End is a poignant 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 and unanswerable mysteries. 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 Allan reckons with these twin losses, he slowly finds his way back to meaning. He dwells in the small moments that make up a life, and in the language and silences that give them shape. The End asks whether it is possible to imagine a future without reading as something other than a failure, and instead as something beautiful and true—a necessary turning away from books and towards what books describe, which is the world and the people in it.