The Beginning Comes After the End (Indie Bookstore Edition): Notes on a World of Change

by Rebecca Solnit

160 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 21, 2026

About the author

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Solnit's work before, I was excited for this chance to read The Beginning Comes After the End. While it's easy to fall into despair, frustration and anger while reading the news these days, I really appreciated Solnit's writing (and this book in particular) to help me reframe what's currently happening across a range of areas by highlighting moments in the past when things seemed similarly bleak but actually led to a major shift in thinking and societal norms. It's an important reminder that change is hard, that small steps matter, that we've done this before and we can continue to make forward progress. In the meantime, it's definitely rough but I'll hold onto this optimism! 4.25/5

Many thanks to Haymarket and NetGalley for the e-arc.