The Beginning Comes After the End

Notes on a World of Change

Rebecca Solnit

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9798888905272
• Print ISBN:
  9798888904510
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
INDEPENDENT PRESS TOP 40 BESTSELLER

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Swimming Upstream
• 2. Winged Seeds
• 3. Varieties of Invisibility
• 4. A Single Garment of Destiny
• 5. Shadows of the Past
• 6. The Disconnectors
• 7. Honey and the Hive
• 8. The River Widens
• 9. Otherwise
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Back Cover