Quartet for the End of Time by Michael Symmons Roberts named Big Issue’s book of the year for 2025

This is a book of gravitas, wrangling with some of the most profound existential issues regarding what it means to be human. Hardly an essential festive fireside read you might think, but Michael Symmons Roberts’ engaging sense of awe and lightness of touch make it just that, and so much more.

Ostensibly this is an examination of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and its composer, but Symmons Roberts also excavates his own personal grief, regrets he can’t shake, and his connection with music, and how that changes according to experience. It is quite a feat by the award-winning poet; moving, intelligent and thought-provoking,

Symmons Roberts has enjoyed a long relationship with the famous Messiaen piece, first coming across it as a teenager when he fell in love with the title in a record shop. He became obsessed with this wild, mercurial composition and determined to investigate its magic. As he dug deeper in his quest he found his own life unexpectedly thrown into relief by the power of the Quartet and soon he was writing about his own loss, faith and about the different ways music and sound – birdsong, spoken poetry, radio silence – come into, and impact upon our lives.

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The book begins with Symmons Roberts dropping the ashes of his parents in Lake Coniston and saying a prayer. He awakes in a panic in the middle of the night, suddenly afraid of allowing his parents to drift and fade away. The book moves backward and forwards from these moments of horror and sorrow to the tale of the author’s relationship with Messiaen’s masterpiece, a composition he describes as “hypnotic, furious, at times ecstatic then achingly spare and still”. (Not a bad description of Symmons Roberts’ writing actually.) 

Messiaen’s own notes resemble Symmons Roberts’ prose, the composer’s synaesthetic brain conjuring up “confetti, light gemstones, and colliding reflections”. Philosophical queries about how one should prepare for the end of time and contemplate the finite nature of life sit on the page next to appreciations of birdsong.

Considerations of the works of various literary giants, from WH Auden to Chekhov to Byron pop up throughout. The book is dazzling in its array of subject matters, all the while striving for something crucial, but intangible. “For many of us, the heart is not just the seat of emotions, but in some profound sense the seat of ourselves.”

Symmons Roberts’ literary skills are much in evidence here. Even the chapter headings – Furious Dance for the Seven Trumpets, Tangle of Rainbows for the Angel who Announces the End of Time – read like the tantalising titles of poems. The prose is heightened throughout, the writing thoughtful, evocative of time and space, and occasionally monumental, offering a surprise or sudden enlightenment. This is an important work of intellectual depth and emotional heft. 

What the Quartet for the End of Time author says

I’m so delighted and very grateful to Big Issue for selecting Quartet for the End of Time as their book of the year. The starting point for this book was buying a record on spec as a student, just because I loved the title set out in French as Quatuor pour la fin du Temps.

It came with a great story on the record sleeve too, about Olivier Messiaen, the composer, writing it while interned in a Nazi labour camp, where the Quartet was premiered in a freezing washroom hut on a battered set of instruments in January 1941, to an audience of prisoners of war.

The music is so strange – mystical, experimental and gorgeous – that I’ve kept going back to it in the decades since that first encounter. During lockdown, I started trying to write about my fascination with this piece of music, but the book kept resisting my attempts to pin it down.

In my poetry books, I’m used to letting the words lead the way, but I felt that a non-fiction book should be better behaved. Then my mother died, not long after my father, so the end of their time became a thread through the book, then Messiaen’s infectious obsession with birdsong (he believed it was the music of the garden of Eden) got me hooked on that too, which set me writing about sound recording and how poems are made, about the challenge of trying to write elegies for your parents, about my own faith and doubt in relation to Messiaen’s devout, visionary beliefs.

Above all, the book became an exploration of what the end of time might mean, and what we might find beyond it.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong by Michael Symmons Roberts is out now (Jonathan Cape, £20).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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