This month on the reading group, I think we should face the darkness. Let’s confront our worst fears. Let’s talk about apocalyptic fiction.

I don’t even have to explain why total annihilation might be topical, do I? And that’s the bad news. It’s hard to be positive about the current state of world politics and the high potential for everything we know and love being snuffed out, after all. But, hey! Let’s try to be positive. The end of the world has inspired hundreds of incredible novels – long before Donald Trump brought the idea back into immediate fears.

You could argue that the floods in Gilgamesh and Genesis are the first examples of the genre. But if you don’t want to take that line, there are many other doom-laden classics to choose from, starting with Mary Shelley’s vision of post-plague London – a “dread period” and “tameless grief” – in her 1826 novel The Last Man. England’s capital could almost have a genre to itself, with novels like Richard Jefferies’ After London, HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds, John Christopher’s The Death of Grass and JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, variously submerging, exploding, emptying and then again submerging the city.

But you might want to go further afield. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, starts with the world’s end. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of superb stories about life after life-as-we-know-it disappearing, from authors as various and wonderful as Ursula K Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred Bester and even EM Forster. The span and inventiveness of scenarios, meanwhile, is astonishing, ranging from zombie apocalypse to environmental disaster to nuclear holocaust to really annoying aliens.

But I am not here to choose our means of destruction. I’m just the facilitator. If you tell us about your favourite post-apocalyptic novel in the comments below, I’ll print off your comment, put it in a hat with all the others, and pull out the winner towards the end of the week. We’ll then spend November reading and commenting on that novel. So please start making suggestions. Our fate is in your hands!