Not much is going on in 1999. People are waiting for the Y2K bug without exactly holding their breath. It’s a year in suspense: caught between the end of the 90s and the dawn of a new millennium; the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terrorism; the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood.

Yet, so many things are on the cusp of making their appearance – the Internet, cell phones, the virtualization of life, Google, and more – with the threat of a bug as big as a tsunami, able to bring everything crashing to a halt, or even crashing down entirely, hanging over the world’s head.

Hardly the End of the World draws us back into that strange period of transition to portray how three characters – Olga, Jules and Alex, all between 19 and 22 years old – step into adulthood and get caught in the flow of history. The characters roam, connected but alone, keeping their anxiety about the future at bay with parties, drugs and a search for genuine emotions in a world growing ever hazier.

A debut novel about the arrival of the year 2000 and the strange effervescence that preceded the change of century and millennium. The last weeks of the twentieth century, as seen through the prism of the lives of three young adults, with their hopes, fears and wandering.