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The New Dark Ages

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What to expect

Reading built the modern world. It helped create democracy, science and reason.

Now, books are dying, and people everywhere are losing the ability to read deeply or think rationally.

The golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through history is breaking.

The screen has replaced the page. Our free time has been colonised by addictive, infantilising slop. A culture of distraction is replacing a culture of reasoned debate.

As reading declines, thought becomes shallower and culture becomes simpler.

Public life is becoming more emotional, more tribal, more irrational.

We are entering a post-literate society. And the world we knew is already beginning to disappear.

Six hundred years after the invention of the printed book, it has never been more threatened or more irreplaceable.

'Without question the most important book of the year' MARINA HYDE

'Superb' TOM HOLLAND

‘Anyone who wants to understand the world today needs to read this book’ NAOMI ALDERMAN

‘One of the most important cultural crises of all. Essential reading’ ANDREW MARR

‘Put down your phone and read this’ HELEN LEWIS

© James Marriott 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

Without any question the most important book of the year. This book is a flashing emergency light for our culture. I genuinely could not love James Marriott's writing and thinking more. Let me sign up to his literacy army right now - I would follow him anywhere
Marina Hyde
Superb. The best way to make the case for good books is to write one - and in this learned and highly entertaining jeremiad, that is precisely what James Marriott has done
Tom Holland
Anyone who wants to understand the world today needs urgently to read this book
Naomi Alderman
If our addiction to smartphones is sapping our ability to concentrate long enough to read a book, James Marriott’s clear, engaging and original prose may yet seduce us back to it, or at least slow our retreat from the page
Philippa Perry
In this bracing and breezy book, James Marriott explains why the world feels so loud, chaotic and angry - we have lost the reflection and empathy fostered by reading. Put down your phone and read The New Dark Ages
Helen Lewis
In this worthy heir to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Marriott makes an urgent and compelling case that the death of reading is accelerating and the consequences might prove worse than we feared
Cal Newport
Pungent, learned and bang up-to-date… A spirited polemic on one of the most important cultural crises of all. Essential reading
Andrew Marr
The New Dark Ages…[is] an essential conversation-start about the imperilled future of reading
Bookseller
A heartfelt polemic ... Both a lament and celebration
Observer
I love James and his bulging brain
Pandora Sykes
Author James Marriott
Narrator James Marriott
Duration 4 hours and 23 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781807842871
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Cultural policies and debates, Literacy, Literature: history and criticism, Media studies: internet, digital media and society, Reportage, journalism or collected columns
Availability AU, GB, IE

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