On Writing My Debut Novel 'Psalms for the End of the World'

The neon-drunk paperback edition of my first book is released this week

While this newsletter is intended to discuss other people’s art — or, rather, art in general — the paperback edition of my debut novel PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is out this week from Headline Books. If you would indulge me, I’m going to tell you a bit about it and what went into the writing of it.

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A pre-Revolutionary French artist whose paintings drive people mad. A pair of Nazi hunters on a quest for bloody vengeance. A Japanese astronaut slowly losing the inspiration to live. Two Black American screenwriters falling in and out of love as their Hollywood careers diverge. A young immigrant building explosive devices under the direction of his pet rabbit. An identity-swapping rockstar whose music some believe possesses coded secrets about reality's true nature.

It's a strange thing to admit, but I only had the vaguest idea of what connected these characters when I began to write my debut novel PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. You might call this ironic, as I’d already spent more than a decade researching the book. But clarity about what all that work meant, what it would become, didn’t arrive until three in the morning—not at all inconvenient timing—nine days after my second son was born in 2018. My mother had recently died and my family had self-exiled ourselves from America after the 2016 election. The world as I understood it was falling apart around me, but I had this beautiful, perfect-in-every-possible-way baby strapped to my chest. As I coaxed him back to sleep, I began to write from a place of surrender and, most importantly, utter confusion. About characters struggling, as I was, to make sense of their worlds, their love, their loss, their despair. Characters whose stories—most of which were insignificant from any historical perspective—began to lash events together across time and even space around a multidimensional mystery.

This mystery begins in 1962 California with Gracie Pulansky, a quantum physics student by day and diner waitress by night, who has fallen for regular customer Robert Jones. Jones comes in every evening to hear about her day and eat pie. When we meet them, he’s distracted by a suitcase he’s placed in the boot of his car, a suitcase filled with ominous purpose. Jones says he's leaving town for work and might not be back for a long time, if at all, words that crush Gracie. But the next night, he shows up anyway – except he doesn’t remember who she is now, not even her name.

Then, FBI agents burst in, guns waving, accusing Jones of blowing up Pasadena City Hall and killing twenty-three people. He and Gracie end up on the run together through America’s Southwest, and then much further, trying to work out what happened to his memory and if he’s the terrorist responsible for the attack.

As Gracie and Jones press their investigation, falling for each other all over again across continents and centuries, their story intersects with those I previously described and many others, ultimately revealing how we’re all connected by love, grief, and quantum physics.

So, it’s a small book.

Jokes aside, my publisher likes to call the novel “a triple-disk, concept album of a book,” but I just think of it as the thing that helped me get through one of the worst periods of my life. I hope it makes you laugh and cry and maybe, just maybe feel less alone in the dark.

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PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, like all books, does not appear in every bookshop around the globe. If you would like to order a copy, you can find out how to do so here. The options I’ve provided should either minimize or eliminate shipping costs.

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Here’s a list of incredibly humbling things newspapers and some brilliant artists have said about PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD:

“Ingenious and compelling.” THE TIMES, BOOKS OF THE MONTH

“Powerful emotional hooks and vividly detailed scene-setting prove compelling, while questions about the meaning of life, human connection, and quantum entanglement make for a fascinating and assured debut novel.” THE GUARDIAN

“A stonkingly complex, mind-bendingly clever, and utterly gripping blockbuster.” DAILY MAIL

“By turns mystifying, infuriating, and finally heartbreaking, Cole Haddon’s mad romp through the universe – (no, make that several universes) – mixes magic, philosophy, action, and metaphysics with the whimsical dexterity of Melville in Moby Dick.” NICHOLAS MEYER (author/director, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN)

“To review this book is easy. It’s extraordinary – read it immediately!” GOOD READING

“A book designed to be more than the sum of its parts, and one that achieves that because love is the thing that binds it together. Vitally fresh.” DOMINIC NOLAN (author, VINE STREET)

“This is a wild, wild ride…immensely thrilling [and] quite majestical.” TIM ROGERS (musician, YOU AM I)

“A trans-dimensional, kaleidoscopic mystery-box of a novel…. wholly and riotously original. Haddon is a mad scientist of genre and his epic is a tour de force.” PETER HO DAVIES (author, A LIE SOMEONE TOLD YOU ABOUT YOURSELF)

“With PSALMS, it’s as if [Haddon]’s written four terrific and totally unique books and folded them together into one Ekpyrotic meta-yarn. The sum is more than the parts - and the parts are pretty darn cool.” THOMAS JANE (actor, “THE EXPANSE”)

“Dazzling, madly ambitious, navigating space and time without a bead of sweat, PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is like nothing I’ve read, which may explain why I couldn’t put it down. This is an assured and fascinating fictional debut from a writer who contains multitudes.” LOUIS BAYARD (author, THE PALE BLUE EYE)

“It certainly deserves all those words like ambitious and adventurous.” KATE EVANS (host, ABC Radio National’s THE BOOKSHELF)

“If David Mitchell and David Bowie had a love child, it would be this jukebox of a novel. It’s batshit, it’s brilliant, it brings you to your knees by the end. Hats off to Cole Haddon, who manages to blow your mind and break your heart at the same time.” RIKI LINDHOME (actor, “WEDNESDAY”)

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A version of this article appeared in RTÉ (the public broadcaster of the Republic of Ireland).