Adrienne Celt
novelist, cartoonist,
and friend to imaginary people and animals
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.
End of the World House is thoughtful, funny, provocative, and creative…. While there’s a temptation to compare the book’s time-bending elements to pop-culture products like Groundhog Day or the streaming series Russian Doll, there is also in Celt’s never-ending museum an echo of the infinite library of Jorge Luis Borges, and in her ruined world where we can only do the best we can, of Samuel Beckett. The author has triumphed by rendering a personal tale against a backdrop of global significance.
A phantasmagoric thrill ride, Adrienne Celt’s End of the World House is a story of apocalypse and art, but also of friendship and love and fighting for a sense of one’s self in the face of modern day alienation and precarity. I love this book for the way it reconsiders how time and space function within novels, how it made me think about memory and art-making, and also, for its acuity and its heart.
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.
Adrienne Celt’s new novel depicts a fraying world (climate crisis, political violence, social upheaval) that’s frighteningly recognizable. It’s a timely novel, as well as one that has great fun exploring what time itself is. Yet End of the World House asks a question that’s timeless: how do we make a meaningful life?
Reading Adrienne Celt is like being granted access to a secret kingdom, another layer of reality you didn’t know existed. Even mundane objects shimmer strangely under the intensity of her gaze. Haunted, romantic, unexpectedly playful, and un-put-down-able, End of the World House will change the way you think about the immortality of art, free will, the future and the past. Adrienne Celt is brilliant and I want to read everything she ever writes.
Adrienne Celt’s writing is such a pleasure to read — fluid, funny, and smart — that the dazzling architecture of End of the World House almost feels like an extravagance. The story of a friendship ravaged by a ruined world, with shades of both Russian Doll and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, this is both a page turner and a shrewd examination of intimacy and survival.