NICK MOUNT

Smashing idols, defacing monuments, burning books, breaking windows, pulling down statues…for as long as humans have created things, they have also wilfully damaged and destroyed them. What is vandalism? Who does it, and why? Does vandalism also create?

Weaving together history, psychology, literature, sociology, and art, Vandals sets off on a jaunty quest through four millennia of human history in pursuit of the shifting role that vandalism has played in societies around the globe and throughout the ages: from Ancient Mesopotamia, where rulers warned off vandals with curses, to our own day, when states and corporations decry the petty crimes of teens and protestors while destroying far more of our world themselves.

A witty and dazzlingly researched romp peopled with pharaohs and prophets, conquistadors and revolutionaries, vandals of art and artists as vandals, Vandals puts forth a dramatic new theory of civilization in which destruction is the constant—and necessary—companion of creation, homo creator also homo destroyer.

To be published February 16, 2027, by Penguin Random House-McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Simon & Schuster internationally.

Available for pre-order now.