I wrote elsewhere about the weekend I spent at Winchester Writers’ Conference, way back in – oh I don’t know, the early years of the 21^st century. It was great – Terry Prachett was the guest speaker, and brought a jazz band along. Carol-Ann Duffy and Michael Morpurgo were there doing signings. I went to a writing workshop led by Beverley Birch. Everything was thronging and full of life.

Except the bit somewhere along the way, where I went to a workshop posing the question why were so few writers addressing the imminent end of everything. So yeah, the two speakers and I discussed possible reasons why so few writers were addressing the imminent end of everything.

I said the reason I came to the workshop was that I’d been increasingly worn down by the notion that I was living in the Goldilocks Zone. Born at the start of the ’60s, in one of the most temperate and safest countries in the world, from my teens onward, the suspicion grew in me that our time, and our place, would turn out to be not just the best but the last time/place that was truly suitable for humans.

But I’m not an especially virtuous person, and the description of me there also applies to a lot of the people at that writers’ conference, all of whom did not come to that workshop so, the question remained.

Here I am 20 or so years later, still wondering the same thing, but with a much greater intensity because I now have grandchildren and most recently, Israel has been doing everything in its power to kill Palestine — kill a whole country, a whole people! — and start world war three while the world burns.

It’s not that there are no literary works on the imminent end of everything. I have blogs in my archives about one or two that I liked – The Ministry for the Future, The High House … but considering the state of the world now, it’s amazing how libraries, bookshops, best seller lists and recommended reads continue to be overwhelmingly not dominated by ‘the end of the world: what’s it like and what can we do about it?’

One of the things we discussed at that long-ago workshop was the strange fact that, at the height of the Cold War, when you could get government leaflets telling you how to build a nuclear shelter out of yoghurt pots and sticky-back plastic or whatever it was, people did want to know – everyone watched Threads, didn’t they? We wondered if the government was happy to go on about the nuclear threat because they could blame the Russians, and we could all worry about it secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t our fault.

Whereas now, in 2025, when the nuclear threat and the climate crisis threat have come together in one god-awful, Zionist flavoured horror story, when I see a novel published in 2022, set in a nuclear bunker, on the praiseworthy display shelves in the library, it stands out.

I reached out my hand. It’s by Rachelle Atalla, it’s won prizes, and if it comes true, it’s our fault. I took it home and read it and found it utterly compelling. The line I used for the title here (‘no-one here is innocent’) is the key theme.

One gradually discovers everyone in that bunker is either of particular use or importance to The Leader, or is important to someone who is important to The Leader. And by taking up the invitation to be there, everyone in that bunker has chosen to survive and leave others behind. And that is what they must learn to live with – if they manage to survive, that is. The book spans a period of time within the 36 months they need to stay underground, so we don’t get to find that out.

It’s a compassionate, realistic story of people loving and learning, through all the things we’re going to need to love and learn through, if our descendants are to survive. Because given the events of the last two years on this earth, just about everyone still standing must be suffering the worst case of collective survivor-guilt ever. Worst ever because we’ve not just survived up to now, but we’re looking to the future whilst thinking even now, if we’re lucky, we might just die a natural death before the water comes over the wall or they Drop the Big One (remember that phrase, fellow children of the ’60s?)

 I’m nominating all three of these books as manuals for the 21st century.

Now, I’m going to go back and read The Pharmacist again, more slowly — because it’s worth it, because it’ll make me think more, and more deeply, about how damaged, guilty people might turn about and start working for the good — something most of our politicians, pretty much all the business leaders and billionaires and everyone in Israel needs us to know for their sakes as well as our own … and also because the main character’s a pharmacist and I have a grand-daughter who wants to be a pharmacist and I’d like there to be a world for her to be a pharmacist in.

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