Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To is a darkly funny novel about writing, love and the messiness of self. The book constantly asks whose story is it and at what price can it be told. As playful as it is emotionally devastating, Natasha Bell expertly navigates a story where the boundaries between author and character have collapsed.

Jarred McGinnis, author of The Coward

Maybe The World Will End So We Won’t Have To is a fantastic, mysteriously dark and funny, literary page-turner which adds a piercingly true queer perspective to the world of autofiction. Bell’s novel twists and turns, wriggling along, shifting us into new perspectives about what it is to use persona and indeed construct a narrative. It acts as a fierce siren, firing off questions to those of us who write and read autobiographical writing – can we resist doing it? How far do we go and at what cost? I loved it.

Karen McLeod, author of Lifting Off: A Life in Freefall

A compelling and wonderfully idiosyncratic novel about, among many other things, the peculiar ethics and practicalities of writing. It’s a thoughtful exploration of what it is to be a writer, but more than that, what it is to be a thinking, feeling person with the capacity to hurt and love others deeply. As tender as it is interrogative, this is a novel for both heart and head, one that surprised and delighted me every time I turned the page.

Amy Jane Stewart, author of Hex House

With Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To, Natasha Bell has done something extraordinary – an irreverent play on the madness and magic of spinning stories, as well as the enduring need to make sense of our surroundings and that nebulous thing we call ‘identity’, through writing. Bell captures this process in its excruciating and transcendent complexity. I found the book playful, surprising and moving. Its lessons and provocations will remain with me.

Amie Corry

Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To is dazzlingly intelligent, searching out the core of truth within the mess of self and self-narration. It is fearlessly honest, emotionally acute and very funny. I loved it.

Jessica Moor, author of Hold Back the Night

Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To is a deep dive into the ethics of writing about “real life”. Bell transforms herself into a character named Harry who transforms herself into a character named Natalie – and by page thirty-two we’re deep inside a narrative fun house. The literary shenanigans include scenes in which Bell’s impatient alter-ego (who proves herself to be a savvy armchair psychologist, a sharp literary critic, and a pretty good pugilist) confronts her creator. But all the while, real life pulses beneath – and through – this beautiful make-believe world of words. In the end, neither the story nor the life it attempts to represent can lay claim to the last word. That honour belongs to something far more human: the messy entanglement of the two.

Kim Adrian, author of Dear Knausgaard

Quite an achievement. Some images will stay with me a long time. Thoroughly examines that border between privacy and exposure, between intimacy and betrayal, and captures the internal thoughts of writers so well. Always thinking of potential storylines, always thinking about plot, always trying to link images to action, to think of twists and reversals and killer lines. The pages turn themselves…

Lara Haworth, author of Monumenta

It seems the autofictional novel to end all autofictional novels has just been written, so we won’t have to. Reading Natasha Bell’s Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To’s structural and allusive prowess, might make us feel this is so. But these nosy, juicy, highbrow, and guilt-ridden sentences beckon us further and further into the mise en abyme of reading witnessing of writing reading. Each layer is a perfect balance of raucously fun and archly disturbing.

Kimberly Campanello, author of Use the Words You Have

Natasha Bell tests how far reality can bend with total control. This is a mesmerising, fiercely intelligent book. I loved it.

Celia Silvani, author of Just Between Mothers

In Maybe The World Will End So We Won’t Have To Natasha Bell introduces the reader to Harry, who in turn creates a character called Natalie and what comes next is a finely crafted, exploration of love, identity, sexuality and the process of storytelling. Playful, honest and darkly funny this novel skilfully weaves observations about what it really means to be a writer with a compelling and surprising plot, the result is pure metafictional joy.

Lisa Smith, author of Jamaica Road