The Beginning Comes After the End

The optimism of this book arrives like a breath of fresh air… Solnit is adamant that positive change - social, political, climate - is not only a possibility but inevitable * Irish Times *
Rebecca Solnit reminds us the power to make change is within our reach * New Scientist *
It would be easy to think we inhabit a global-digital age of despair… Think again, says Rebecca Solnit… In nine deft chapters, she pushes back on the current political gloom, setting it against the achievements made since the 1960s in decolonisation, environmentalism and gender equality, as well as within her own experience of US civil, labour, LGBT+ and indigenous rights * Financial Times *
Beautiful and inspiring: this book gives us the courage to face change, and to make it – George Monbiot
A powerful meditation on transformation in turbulent times… Solnit argues that the current turmoil signals the dying throes of patriarchy and colonialism… A rallying call for all those who yearn for a just, sustainable and flourishing society * Conversation *
Timely… As a deliberate exercise in reframing - as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms - The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens * Guardian *
One of the most important thinkers of our times… [Solnit] asks the reader to act without guarantees, to move without knowing how the story ends. Certainty, she argues, belongs to the status quo but justice lives in the unknown * Buzz Magazine *
A rousing call urging its readers to perceive the current moment as one of dramatic, hopeful change - infused with Solnit’s characteristic clarity…. As she sees it, despair is a luxury, and surrendering is a form of breaking solidarity, at odds with the theme of interconnection that runs throughout The Beginning Comes After the End * Resurgence & Ecologist *
Exhilarating, expansive, and galvanising thinking… The Beginning Comes After the End invites the reader to witness this change, shoulder to shoulder with one of the great thinkers of our age, and to share in the collective purpose and exhilaration. In that way, and in so many others, the revolution has already begun * Writers Mosaic *

REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award, The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope, and the climate crisis, and writes regularly for the Guardian. She lives in San Francisco.

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