The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) is the second volume in Douglas Adams's beloved Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the comic science fiction sequence that Adams himself described as a trilogy in five parts, following the global success of the first volume and continuing the absurdist misadventures of the hapless Englishman Arthur Dent, the alien Ford Prefect, the two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, the brilliant Trillian, and the chronically depressed robot Marvin as they navigate a universe of breathtaking implausibility and bureaucratic indifference. The novel's central conceit, the restaurant of the title known as Milliways, is a dining establishment situated at the literal end of time and space, to which patrons travel from across the universe to watch the apocalypse over dinner, a premise that allowed Adams to deploy his characteristically devastating satirical wit against the pretensions of fine dining, corporate hospitality, and humanity's capacity for cheerful obliviousness in the face of cosmic catastrophe. The Folio Society has described Adams's work as comparable to Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Stoppard, Lewis Carroll, and Jonathan Swift, and the series as a whole has sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide, making Adams one of the most commercially successful British comic writers of the twentieth century.