End of the World House

Staff Top Fives

Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!

End of the World House is so many things: an irresistible trapped-in-a-time-loop story, an exploration of how the most important relationships in your life change over time, an all-too-realistic view of working a professional job during an apocalypse that’s unsettlingly close to our own (different details, same vibes). This novel is also so well-crafted — it shifted into different, unexpected shapes, and I loved every surprising turn. There are moments that feel like an A24 horror movie, or the best song on a break-up album, or laughing so hard with your closest friend that your eyes hurt. A masterpiece! Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com

Groundhog Day meets Ling Ma's Severance in End of the World House, a thought-provoking comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them.

Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a prominent Silicon Valley tech firm. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

When Bertie's attempts to make Kate stay fail, she suggests the next-best thing: a trip to Paris that will hopefully distract the duo from their upcoming separation. The vacation is also a sort of last hurrah, coming during a ceasefire in a series of escalating world conflicts.

One night in Paris, they meet a strange man in a bar who offers them a private tour of the Louvre. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated, and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything. In order to make her way back to Kate, Bertie has to figure out how much control she has over her future — and her past — and how to survive an apocalypse when the world keeps refusing to end.

"Truehearted and affecting" Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliant." Popsugar

"An enjoyably mind-bending trip through an all-too-realistic depiction of the breakdown of society, Bertie's unexpected journey explores the power of relationships to shape our reality." Booklist

"Adrienne Celt has crafted something brilliant with End of the World House. This book is an intoxicating mix of beauty, art, and mystery. Celt writes about the tangled threads of close friendship with tremendous skill and a wild amount of heart. It's a novel that's undeniably funny, unafraid to look at the messy ways we unwittingly complicate our lives as well as the lives of the people closest to us. A compelling look at intimacy and its myriad vulnerabilities, End of the World House is a stunner." Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth

“In this new novel from the ever-ingenious Adrienne Celt, a couple of close friends are visiting the Louvre when they find that the world as they've known it has ended. Marvelously imaginative and terrifyingly plausible, a time-bending funhouse riddled with rabbit holes, End of the World House is slippery and uncanny and so very compelling.” R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

Adrienne Celt is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two previous novels: Invitation to a Bonfire and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Adrienne is also a cartoonist, and she publishes a weekly webcomic at LoveAmongtheLampreys.com.