End of the World House

November 1, 2021

San Francisco-based best friends Bertie and Kate are in Paris enjoying a last big get-together before Kate moves to Los Angeles when a stranger offers them a private tour of the Louvre. Soon they find themselves alone in the museum, then separated, as events keeps repeating in an endless loop (think Groundhog Day) and Bertie tries to exert some control and get back to Kate. From the author of the NPR best-booked The Daughters; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

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December 1, 2021
When Bertie and Kate are offered a private tour of the Louvre by a man they meet at a Parisian bar, it almost seems too good to be true. The friends are taking this trip before Kate moves to a new city; the borders have now reopened, although after years of storms, shortages, bombings, and unrest, the global situation still feels precarious. Bertie and Kate arrive at the museum and are ushered inside without incident, but Bertie will soon discover it's easier to get in than to get out. None of her photos seem to turn out, the elevators are mysteriously moving on their own, and Kate suddenly disappears after a spat. In an increasingly disconcerting and ominous atmosphere, Bertie tries navigating the strange magnetism of the Louvre and the loop of time she suddenly is caught in, and her boyfriend, Dylan, arriving on the scene, only complicates things further. 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.

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January 3, 2022
Celt (Invitation to a Bonfire) returns with a confounding fun house that plays with the nature of time and existence to diminishing returns. In a near future, a restless California cartoonist named Bertie travels to Paris with her best friend, Kate. Things turn dark when Kate accepts an offer from a man named Javier to take a private tour of the Louvre. The moment they set foot in the museum, Kate disappears, and Celt introduces Dylan, a past (or future?) boyfriend of Bertie’s. Nothing makes sense after that, and with Kate gone, Bertie and Dylan return home (or do they?). When Dylan reacts strangely to Bertie’s idea for a graphic novel, Bertie realizes something is very wrong. Dylan seems to know everything about her, but he’s keeping something big a secret. She takes another trip to Paris and begins to sketch out her novel (which turns out to be picture after picture of Kate), and returns to the Louvre to look for her friend and confront the upside-down world she’s discovered. Some readers may be initially hooked by the ambitious premise, but storytelling pyrotechnics aside, neither the narrative nor the characters are fully realized. It’s intriguing, but more so frustrating.

March 1, 2022
Best friends take a trip to Paris, where they relive the same mysterious day again and again. The whole world is going to hell. Gas is $10 a gallon. Most countries have closed their borders and enacted media blackouts due to civil unrest, bombings ("the nouveau Blitz") and collapsed economies. "No one would call it a world war," the novel tells us, "but that was semantics." During a cease-fire, Californian best friends and early-30-somethings Kate and Bertie decide to take a trip to Paris, taking advantage of cheap prices designed to attract travelers not too skittish to venture abroad. At a bar, Kate and Bertie meet a Frenchman who promises a private tour of the Louvre, so the women arrive only to become separated in the museum--over and over again. Bertie, the corporate illustrator from whose close third-person perspective the novel is told, keeps waking up and reliving the trip to the Louvre with only the vaguest subconscious sense of d�j� vu each time. But one day, it isn't Kate whom Bertie meanders the empty museum with, but Dylan, a man who seems to know a great deal about what's going on with time and where Kate might have disappeared to. When he begins to clue Bertie in, she realizes that the mystery goes deeper than she ever could have imagined. Celt's decision to use a near apocalypse as the setting never fully makes sense; likewise, the logic behind the time loop remains just beyond full comprehension. The result is a novel whose picture never comes clear, like the photos Bertie takes as time slips around her. But as an allegory of friendship and the way adult relationships complicate the friendships we try to keep alive from youth, Celt's story is truehearted and affecting. A muddled but moving novel.

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