Illustrated by Jonathan Burton
Introduced by Adam Roberts
Comparing Adams’s work to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard and even Jonathan Swift, science-fiction writer Adam Roberts describes this novel as ‘that rare thing: a sequel that surpasses its original’.
In the beginning the universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams continues his ’trilogy in five parts’ with more on Arthur Dent and his friends. They have escaped the Vogons and are on the Heart of Gold spaceship, but it is not long before disaster strikes. Arthur asks the ship’s computer to make a cup of tea, which occupies it so completely that it is unable to evade an angry Vogon battleship. Fortunately, Zaphod’s great-grandfather (contacted during a séance) succeeds in rescuing the ship and sending Zaphod to the headquarters of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – where the trouble really begins. At least their adventures will take them to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, ’one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering’.
Douglas Adams’s work has been compared to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard and even Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift. He combines entertaining inventions such as Playbeing magazine with original thoughts on everything from politics to evolution. In his introduction, science-fiction writer Adam Roberts describes The Restaurant at the End of the Universe as ’that rare thing: a sequel that surpasses its original’. Illustrator Jonathan Burton has outdone himself with depictions of scenes such as the appalling paradise of Ursa Minor Beta and the captain of the Golgafrinchan regiment having a bath.
Bound in blocked glittered cloth
Set in Sabon
224 pages
Frontispiece and 7 colour illustrations
Metallic slipcase
9˝ × 5¾˝
Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams studied at Brentwood boarding school before going on to earn a BA, and later an MA, from Cambridge. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) was originally written as a weekly radio series and was later developed into a novel. This was followed by The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). Adams died in 2001.
Jonathan Burton has worked as an illustrator since 1999, after graduating with an MA from Kingston University, London. He has been awarded two silver medals from the Society of Illustration in New York, two Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts, and has received the Overall Professional Award for 2013 from the Association of Illustrators. For The Folio Society he has also illustrated Cover Her Face by P. D. James, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and the entire Hitchhikers series. He lives in Bordeaux, France.
If aliens were watching us, what would their favourite TV show be? What’s next for that unique publishing phenomenon, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? And how do you make the perfect sandwich? These and other unlikely questions are answered in the final volume of Adams’s universe-spanning odyssey.
In the first in his ‘trilogy of five’, Douglas Adams introduces us Earthbound readers to Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Babel fish, Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters and Marvin the Paranoid Android.
In the fourth volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Arthur Dent finds a whole new set of mind-boggling mysteries to deal with when planet Earth appears not to have been destroyed after all.
More inspired lunacy in the third of Adams’s ‘trilogy of five’, here introduced by his friend, the acclaimed comedy writer Jon Canter.
