There’s a certain type of household appliance so common in Swedish homes that you forget it’s something of a Nordic peculiarity. I’m thinking of what’s known elsewhere as a drip brewer, or filter coffee machine. If it’s a niche product abroad, signalling the refined tastes of a connoisseur, here it’s a staple — a home feels incomplete without it.

In case you’re unfamiliar with this contraption, it works by means of a slow, gravity-fed process. Water is heated and released in steady pulses over a bed of ground coffee held in a paper filter. The resulting brew collects in a glass carafe, usually perched on a warming plate that keeps it gently simmering long after the ritual itself is done. It’s an unhurried technology — neither as theatrical as an espresso machine nor as artisanal as a pour-over — but somehow more democratic than both.

In Sweden, its presence is almost invisible for being so universal. The gentle dripping sound in the morning belongs to the background music of domestic life, as ordinary and reassuring as the hum of a fridge or the soft ticking of a wall clock.

In one of my earliest memories, I’m perched on a high chair, watching, hypnotised, as the machine comes to life and starts spurting hot water over the perfect bed of ground coffee. I bet on which little islands of dry grains will hold out the longest. I repeat the ritual again and again, secretly hoping that this time one small haven of dryness will survive the brewing of a full pot. It never does. Still, many decades later, I sometimes find myself lost in reverie, replaying the same scene.

I’m reminded of this hope against all odds as I turn the last page of Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song.

The story unfolds in a parallel dystopian universe where the Republic of Ireland descends into civil war. It follows the Stack family as they struggle to survive and stay sane amid what begins as totalitarian repression and devolves into full-on urban warfare.

While I don’t want to spoil the plot, I think it’s fair to say that the story remains faithful to the conventions of dystopia. In the end, its protagonist, Eilish — having lost her husband and two of her four children — makes it across the border into Northern Ireland, only to face the prospect of crossing the Irish Sea in the middle of winter aboard a perilously unseaworthy vessel.

The ending reminds me why I usually steer clear of dystopian fiction: the real world is already grim enough that I want my reading to offer at least a sliver of relief. The smallest glimmer of hope would have sufficed, but none is granted. Which is, of course, as it should be — for Eilish’s story is unbearable precisely because it feels so true to life.

While Prophet Song isn’t a long novel, it’s taking me ages to finish. It’s simply too painful to take in all at once. Afterwards, I don’t feel tricked out of time the way I sometimes do after wasting an evening on a cheap film. It’s not time I’ve been robbed of, but some measure of blue-eyed innocence. Deep down, I know Eilish’s story exposes the cruel bone structure of the world as it really is. I know it — I just don’t want to be reminded. I don’t appreciate being shaken out of my oblivion.

And yet it’s complicated, because on some level, of course, I do. The feeling seems akin to offering a sacrifice to a god: you pay a steep price and receive in return something you never quite wished for, yet which carries its own undeniable value.

Eilish’s story joins three others in my mind’s library that have left me similarly undone: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

They all chart the slow unravelling of civilisation and the stubborn persistence of humanity within it. Each depicts a world stripped to its essentials — families on the move, faith eroded, hunger close at hand — yet none relinquish the possibility of grace. They’re not just about suffering, but about what remains when everything else has been taken: love, dignity, the faint pulse of moral courage.

What makes them unbearable, to me, isn’t the hardship itself but the refusal to give up hope — the belief that things will turn around, that endurance will somehow be rewarded — only to face the bleak realisation that the world doesn’t reward endurance, only records it.

If I were to add a fifth story, it would be Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. While not a dystopia in the usual sense, it inhabits a world every bit as dehumanising — a jungle of mud, fear, and obedience, where brutality isn’t imposed by the state but grows organically from the chain of command itself. Mailer’s soldiers aren’t fighting for freedom or ideology; they’re simply surviving one another.

That is, until they don’t. The platoon’s moral compass — and, by extension, the reader’s — Lieutenant Hearn, is abruptly killed halfway through that brick of a book. His death isn’t the stuff of any glorious climax; it happens almost offhandedly, as if just another logistical detail. The story doesn’t pause to mourn him. It simply carries on, indifferent, as the platoon trudges deeper into the jungle. The shock isn’t just that he dies; it’s that the narrative itself refuses to confer meaning on the loss.

Seen together, these five stories hinge on the same desperately human need for meaning. We say hope is the last thing to abandon us, but if hope often concerns physical survival — finding food, shelter, the strength to go on — its deeper function is narrative. Hope lets us believe our suffering will add up to something, that endurance will be rewarded with coherence.

Each of these stories dismantles that belief. Their protagonists cling to meaning as if it were oxygen, only to discover that the world neither notices nor cares. And yet, in witnessing their struggle, we can’t help but feel that meaning persists — not in the plot, but in the act of bearing witness itself.

In the end, I suppose that’s what I’m doing each time I watch the water pulse through the filter — repeating an old, private liturgy of hope. I know the islands won’t last, but I watch them anyway, entranced by their brief defiance before the flood.