A group of friends come of age in Belgrade just as their country falls apart and go on to become artists in exile, trying to make sense of everyday life at the dawn of the 21st century; an Irish engineer and a Norwegian medical student fall in and out of love; one day everyone loses the ability to harness electricity and disease and famine stalk the lands of Europe. These are among some of the stories in Ragnarok, the roman-fleuve by Irish novelist John Holten, that wishes to push the power of art to create meaning out of a chaotic world obsessed with the end times, and in turn connect the past and present to any possible future.

Composed over a 15 year period, the settings range from Belgrade to Paris, Oslo to Berlin. Comprising the books The Readymades (2011), Oslo, Norway (2015) and The Trains of Europe (2024), all originally published by Broken Dimanche Press, they're now brought together (as they were originally conceived) in a special, limited edition box set edition.

Taking its name from the Norse myth of the same name - in which a series of foretold events that include natural catastrophes and the submergence of the world - the wide cast of characters intersect and converge as their ends and fate rush toward them.

The three books borrow from the crime novel and autofiction, from academic writing and art-history, from the street atlas and the post-apocalyptic. At their heart is ‘To Warmann’, a metafictional, nested book that’s talismanic and which leads the reader to the blind spot at the end of the world before, as in the myth, all things can start again.