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.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Douglas Adams
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˝
About Douglas Adams
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.
About Jonathan Burton
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, the full 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series by George R. R. Martin and the entire Hitchhiker's series along with an extraordinary limited edition of Adams’s comedic space odyssey. Most recently, he illustrated the Folio edition of The Enchanted Wood (2023) and The Magic Faraway Tree (2024). Jonathan lives in Bordeaux, France.
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