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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. This week I'm joined by the Irish writer Mark O'Connell, whose new book is called Notes from an Apocalypse, a personal journey to the end of the world and back.

Mark, welcome.

Your book published, as we saw you,

had a kind of virtual book launch in the end.

You know, right when your subject seemed to be coming to the front of the news,

how are you getting on with the apocalypse now it's actually happening?

Yeah, fine, thanks, having a great apocalypse.

I mean, it's a weird one.

Like, it's obviously, it's strange and stressful publishing a book at the best of times, as you know,

but it's particularly strange when, you know, bookshops are not open.

So that's a big sort of peculiarity of this situation. It is I mean it's it's been

odd to be honest publishing a book about the apocalypse at a time when no one seems to be able to

think or speak about anything other than how apocalyptic things feel. So yeah it's a strange one.

I mean there's some of the sort of discussion around the book has been, you know, talking about how prescient it is and how timely and so on. Obviously, that's sheer look, whether it's good luck or bad look. I have no idea, but there's, you know, I can't claim any sort of special prescience or anything like that. But yeah, it's, it's a weird one. And like, you know, publishing a book generally involves a lot of sort of

schlepping around the place, going here and there, getting on planes, all that sort of

thing.

And I've just been stuck in my spare room at home doing all this publicity from like book

launches to podcasts to newspaper interviews to whatever.

So yeah, in some ways it's almost ideal because I don't, I mean,

I like being places, but I don't like traveling. I don't like getting on planes that much.

So this has been kind of like fine, actually. But now, of course, nothing appeals to me more than

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