The End of Everything

by M. John Harrison

Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.

Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Speculative Fiction, Audiobook

Audible Audio

First published June 18, 2026

About the author

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
The nomination of Jarvis Cocker as a Booker judge made me hope for a list that embraces the weird and the whacky, and I was not disappointed: Not only is "The End of Everything" genre lit (SciFi), which makes some self-declared high-end literati shudder, it also tells an intentionally opaque story about an alien invasion - at least on the obvious plot level. The whole vibe remindede me of Brautigan's classic In Watermelon Sugar, and I'm sure the iGhetti, Harrison's alien species, are not only named like this as a nod to Apple, thus sticking to the theme of a super intelligence that is taking over an increasingly disoriented humanity, but also points to Brautigan's concept of iDeath - "In Watermelon Sugar" revolves around this equally enigmatic concept, also prompting readers to fill in the blanks regarding what is even going on.

Harrison gives us a dystopia set in Britain in the near future, after "the crisis" - we don't know what exactly happened, but the iGhetti, spectral entities, have taken London, the government is merely functioning, mainland Europe has become even more detached, and there is no reliable source of information anymore, neither in form of legacy nor social media, so people don't know what is happening regarding the war against the iGhetti: This is an eternal now of insecurity, a dangerous world of instability. Our protagonist Phillip Tennent is a beachcomber who lives with his artistic aunt Marnie, and one day he drags an object out of the sea that is somehow connected to the iGhetti, an artefact that keeps changing and evolving, becoming more and more dangerous...

There is no one way to read this novel, but I was constantly thinking of AI and Silicon Valley dreams of transhumanism and super-intelligence, of an ever-evolving technology becoming maybe not conscious, but alive and efficiently following a script by learning and adapting. And then there's the people: They cut ties with other countries (there's reverberations of Brexit here) to increase the power of the financial haven by getting rid of regulations, then this haven (London) is taken by aliens (aka the technology developed by the richest of the rich) enforcing their own agenda, and then the periphery is tranformed. And I'm so curious to read all the other interpretations this story invites.

This is truly something else for a Booker list, and it's a novel that's particularly suited for discussion - and that's the power of the Booker, to invite global discussions about books.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch out for this one. It smells like a winner.

Tuesday, when the Booker longlist was announced, I was surprised by many books. It happens every year. The End of Everything wasn't one of them. I've seen this book appear on my radar constantly in the past months and, of course, I ignored it because I rarely read sci-fi. The Booker made me realise the obvious: word of mouth came from spaces that weren't necessarily genre-friendly. So don't make this mistake when you see this (maybe for the first time) on a list that this year seems to have more weird titles than usual. This will be the one that deserves the inclusion, and maybe even more. Perhaps the time has come for M. John Harrison to be more than a cult author. We will see.

This post-apocalyptic novel, about a world where an unknown entity has changed the course of humanity in ways that aren't really clear, is the kind of blank space that offers the reader the opportunity to tell what they see in it, and maybe what their fears are. iGhetti has invaded London, but we don't know what it is or what it wants. It could be the effect of the climate crisis, aliens, or just AI.

Probably the most fascinating part is what humans do when they encounter the unknown. The answer may surprise you: they survive. Adaptation is just the fastest way back to the ordinary.

Phillip Tennet, a beachcomber who just discovered an artefact that may offer the answers everyone is searching for, and his aunt Marnie, an artist who shows signs of dementia, aren't really anything more than two ordinary people. Even their violent outbursts aren't that special for a dystopian environment. Maybe the (non)response to those acts shows the unpredictability of living in an unruled place, but their life is pretty regular. The end of the world can be a continuous event, just like a war, and when you are in the middle of it, you learn to see your life as best as you can. Marnie lives like any other person battling old age and dementia, trapped between lost memories and false nostalgic ones, while Phillip, like any other man close to middle age, can still hope for another future, maybe in another place that maybe was untouched by this entity.

Because, like a character says, the end means that a new beginning is around the corner. The question is who will be at the top. Can humans willingly surrender control to something else, or learn to coexist?

This is a profound novel that can be read in so many ways, and I think its value comes from offering all those possibilities and making readers see, in this story, something that happens right now in the world. And here is another idea: the end of everything doesn't matter. The end is personal, and it will always remain that way.

[Katia N]

While reading this novel, I’ve remembered a poem written in the 60s by a Soviet female writer:

‘As someone rightly noted, for ages already, there has been this strong cave wind blowing our way, for ages there has been a burning smell in the air; but we are stubbornly passing it by as if it is not there, and keep rushing off to the beach, to work, to the movies.’

What initially surprised me is that the feeling so strongly conveyed by this novel was there already at least half a century ago in a very different setting and very different place. This feeling of existential uneasiness with environment but also human ability to deny and to adapt. Maybe, only maybe, this foreboding of catastrophe has been a part of a human condition through all the history. It is also certain that many catastrophes are taking place for some people on this planet this very moment: wars, genocides, fires. And for those people, those individual human beings, it is not the question of choice how to survive, it is the way of existence. But they still try to live 'normal life', even to make some plans, even if they know the future may never come.

Back to the book. Normally I do not follow book prizes and my personal choice of contemporary fiction tends to have a zero overlap with the Booker list. But i was surprised to discover that this time two books i’ve read earlier in the year have somehow made it to the list. Interestingly, those were the two out only four recent contemporary titles i’ve read. Encouraged by such a success rate, I’ve sampled some other titles on the list and this one has grabbed me by its first sentence:

'For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea where artefacts were washed up every day.'

The sentence by itself has already told a mini-story. There was a promise and an intrigue in juxtaposing almost idyllic image with some kind of unknown source of uneasiness bordering on an alarm. So i’ve taken the plunge.

I can now report that what I’ve just read was sufficiently bonkers, but in a good way, very well written, poetic at places but a bit lacking on originality front as these type of novels go. (It is an open question though how a dystopian novel could be original in the current world). However, I’ve enjoyed reading it. I liked its deliberate incoherence. And I feel sufficiently intrigued to read the author’s earlier work sometime soon to understand his whole project better. I felt this work was an addition to some textual universe he had created before.

This novel has got a strong echo of J.G. Ballard catastrophe novels (ie High-Rise): familiar places are deliberately defamiliarised; dilapidated post-industrial landscapes; people who have just survived some kind of a catastrophe or might live under the shadow of a threat they do not totally understand. Apart from Ballard, Tarkovsky’s Stalker comes to mind as well if one set ‘the zone’ in a coastal area of North Kent (the UK).

The motive of pointless violence committed by the most vulnerable people is the strong one. Arguably such people are assumed to be the most innocent, who are usually more suitable for the role of the victims. So here we are for a shock factor. In this respect the book has reminded me of László Krasznahorkai, the recent Nobel laureate earlier described by Susan Sontag as the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse. Nothing could compare with his character from Satantango, a seven year old child, torturing her pet cat and forcefully feeding it to death with poisoned milk. But a slightly demented granny with a kitchen knife punishing a teen to death and then going on a killing spree with a gun might not be too far. Characteristically, in both cases they end up killing the creature they love the most.

This is a kind of a novel that is temporarily set in a twilight zone of some apocalypse. This is the time of decadence before some possible new meaning would appear from the ruins of the old. More fortunate people would either be able to escape or successfully fence their surroundings. Less fortunate people might obtain a license to be savages for a time being (even and maybe more so if they are elderly artists).

The basic set up of this novel is more or less straightforward: a dystopian present; there is some phenomenon called ‘ighetty’ (imho, not very imaginatively). No one knows what it is but this thing seems to invade the city of London and they shoot at it just in case. Not that far away in the river's estuary and the coastal area, three main characters Philip, the beachcomber, his aunt and the artefact Philip has found in the sea try to hang on or maybe escape by moving around and getting themselves in different ‘situations’. The chapters are short, impressionistic and only loosely connected. They are more like scenes, snapshots, the matter; distinct points in this weird space and time. Some of them are letters, extracts from a diary or some sort of flashbacks.

This is for example a beautiful intermission of the one of the chapters:

Everything in the picture has been driven mad by the light. Do you see? The ocean, the beach, the people, the objects. The frozen yet energetic motion of the waves, clouds, bathers, ships, everything is an accident of the painted light - a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something.

This is the one of those novels that is very likely meant to be ‘co-written’ by the reader in the sense of Roland Barthes (his death of the author business). Every reader would enter into an imaginative collaboration by bringing her personal associations and experiences to uniquely interpret this text and to fill in its numerous lacunas. Respectively every reader is left a lot of freedom by the author to make a coherent story out of this if she wishes: to decide who/what ‘ighetty’ and artefacts might be; what those characters mean when they interact with each other and how all of this might end. The readers who like this kind of game and the subject matter would be pleased.

There are also a few “Easter eggs” scattered in the text here to be found. For example, Alexander Grothendieck got name-checked. He was the one of the creators of the modern geometry but got mad lately and has lead a secluded life writing some weird diary. There is a character in the novel who might be modelled on him. Another ‘eggs’ are Turing’s apple (poisoned), references to Picasso’s paintings and direct mention of Cy Twombly. There are probably many more.

The readers also can entertain themselves trying to guess where exactly on the Kent coast the story takes place or try to identify the latest social phenomena alluded in the novel: Covid; Brexit, small boats crisis and emergence of artificial intelligence is in there.

With the small boats, he did something quite poignant: ‘Small boats traffic on the Channel routes had subsided to a trickle then reversed like a kind of backed-up plumbing of the collective soul.’ In this world people want to live the island for the continent. Moreover, they are not sure anymore if the continent still exist but this does not stop them from going bringing up a certain metaphysical dimension to this in terms of their direction of travel. Again i’ve seen something similar has been done in the recent fiction already, but it is an impressive detail here anyway.

The word ‘artefact’ might be pointing at ‘artificial fact’. In this interpretation, an artificial intelligence is portrayed here, trying to appropriate human thoughts, shapes, form and habits, attempting to create a shallow physical likeness of a real person in order to replace him in the minds of the others, trying to please. But also some people seem to adapt to fall in love with it etc. This does not seem too dystopian nowadays.

In alluding to so many current social themes this novel has reminded me of Ali Smith's recent work. Fortunately this author is more subtle and does not attempt to create a sharp but didactic political vector in here. In spite of all these allusions, there is a lot promising ambiguity in the text. As any good book, it just refuses to be reduced to any single message. But also some ideas from the text seemed pretty unambiguous to me.

One of them is sheer adaptability of human specie to its environment, especially psychologically and even in the case of a catastrophe. People seem to be keep going in the middle of it as in an eye of a storm. The world’s over. But that doesn’t matter. Because another one will be along soon enough. (P142). That seems to be a prevailing belief even in the world of this novel. In our own world i was reading this novel in the middle of another heatwave. While trying to find a cooler place I’ve come across the following headline “great human gift for ignoring catastrophe”. I think i’ve understood better why Virgil has portrayed the Greeks ignoring Cassandra who was shouting impeding doom from all the corners. And honestly, i am not sure whether this attitude was so misplaced. This novel is very good portraying a similar situation of a collapse. But no-one is quite sure whether it is coming or already has taken the place.

Earlier in the novel, the aunt writes to younger Philip: ‘Don’t, whatever you do, do what I did with my life, and let your cleverness turn you into an observer.’ (P45)

But is this a lesson that is possible to learn without a hindsight?

I felt there was also a very strong general humanist message in the novel: every society as a whole is as prosperous and educated as its the most poor vulnerable member and we should all help each other. If not the things would keep happening (ighetto or not). The author seems to be saying ‘look around’ they are happening’. At least there would be no way to say ‘we didn’t see it coming.’

We did it collectively. ighetty possibly our creation. Long before I ghetto arrived everyone was playing out a separate fantasy...Things had gone wrong before they came, and it was possible to admit that now.

In the absolutely still air and came to the inescapable conclusion: the ighetty are only mirage… They are only a refraction of something else in the universe, something we can’t know about because it’s the other side of some horizon. Perhaps we are too.

The italics is mine. Perhaps, everyone who would read this book would be able to eliminate a bit of ighetty dust from her imagination. Or maybe - not.

The omega symbol has somehow appeared on my page. So it is a good point to wrap up:

Ω

PS
For those who are interested to learn about history and theory of societal collapse through a few millenniums and main risks for the future there is a recent book well written Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp, an academic currently working at Cambridge. It is very lucid on the past, less so in terms of how to mitigate the growing risks for the future. But interesting read in any case.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt like I had forgot how to read

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

With the coming of the iGhetti, the military operators of the state had regained all it sense of entitlement, while the City of London, puzzled and defeated, had relinquished the top spot in the conversation and could only huddle at the edges of its old power base, like a monarchist staring into a museum display.

I first encountered M. John Harrison in 2017, rather late in his brilliant career, via his short-story and flash-fiction compilation You Should Come With Me Now, published by Comma Press and entered by them into the Republic of Consciousness Prize for fiction from small presses.

One of the more striking works in that collection, which Harrison also included in the curated collection Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (also from Comma Press) was The Crisis (link to an online version at the Morning Star). At first read the banker-bashing put me off, but revisiting in the later collection, I saw the brilliance of what he'd done.

The Crisis told of the 'invasion' of the UK by the iGhetti, who ended up occupying the City of London, which itself turned into a form of ghost world (oddly prescient of the City during Covid), a form of surreal, disconcerting take on war of the worlds :

No one was certain whether the arrival of the iGhetti was an invasion or a natural catastrophe.

They resembled stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb, which appeared and evolved very quickly from nothing, like the tentacles which seem to bulge out of nowhere when you burn a piece of mercuric sulphocyanate. You would see them for a fraction of a second just at the city skyline behind the buildings, just under the cloud base, evolving very fast like stop-frame film of something organic growing, then running out of energy, then growing again. They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. The sirens would go off, all across the city from Borough to Camden. The artillery would fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The iGhetti would pulse and grow against the lighted clouds. Then they were gone again for another day.

Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Some people associated the iGhetti with Dark Matter; some with the banking crisis of the late Noughties. Others believed that they “came out of the internet.” (Indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself: the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.) While none of these theories could be described as true, they did, perhaps, mirror the type and scale of the anxieties that led the iGhetti to us.

I was drawn particularly to Harrison's views on genre, but one not delivered from the snobbish camp of a writer of self-proclaimed high-brow literary fiction, but rather from one writing within genres, the F/SF world and an authot, at that point, relatively unrecognised by literary fiction awards.

Dividing literature into genres is limiting, a marketing device that got out of hand, and leaked into the audience ... A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that.

from the Guardian

My urge is less to transgress genre boundaries than insult them ... writing specifically for a genre isn't just reductive, it's an attempt to hide, a form of cowardice. It's special pleading, but it doesn't work.

from SFSite.com (via Wayback Machine)

That overdue recognition from the literary fiction world came with Harrison's brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, a worthy winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, and a story that drew on one of the pieces in You Should Come With Me Now, Babies from Sand.

That's all a lengthy contextual preamble to my review of The End of Everything, Harrison's latest novel, and another brilliantly unsettling work which challenges genre conventions.

The author himself describes it as 'Conceived around 2010 as a book that might have been submitted for serialisation at New Worlds in 1967, The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong.'

The End of Everything builds on the world of the story The Crisis, and a discombobulated England in the aftermath of the iGhetti, indeed large parts of that story are incorporated in the novel.

[- the unnamed narrator of that story here becomes Philip (who now only pretended to work on 14th floor of the stub of Undershaft rather than actually working on the 14th floor of the stub of the Shard)
- Jane and Jack, become Alice and Jack, and the financially successful Jack is now a reinsurer not an investment banker.
- Balker becomes Hampson, who now enacts under his own volition the experiments he was forced to do in the story
- and to the list of theories about the iGhetti is, importantly, added others believed it to be less an invasion than a 're-enchantment of the world', a process of spiritual toruism and gentrification pursued by advanced civiliasations from a mooted ninth planet]

But crucially the action of the novel is relocated from City of London to the sea-side art towns of the UK from Margate to Hastings and 'Dalston-on-Sea'.

In the beginning–if there could be said to have been one–no one really understood what had happened. There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders–from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog–fell in on themselves. By the time things came back into focus, the climate had changed. Geography had changed. Everyone had a different idea about that. The internet was patchy and undependable; and though the war with the aliens continued, people could never agree on what kind of a war it was, or what its boundaries were.

Coastal time always lags behind. In places like this one–which had previously thought of itself as a convenient weekend refuge two hours drive south-east of the Square Mile, comprising a couple of pubs, a terrace of flint-faced alms houses and a Queen Anne vicarage, organised around a small but somehow spacious square–it seemed to stretch out and pass even more slowly than before.

When the novel opens, a decade or two after the events of The Crisis, Philip Tennant has been living on the edge of the sea as a beachcomber, biding his time, one of those 'waiting for the item that will give them pause for thought'. He finds it in the form of 'an artefact' - a humanoid/machine hybrid that grows visibly while in his care. He takes it with him to his aunt Marnie, a painter who has lived in the area for far longer, who decides to set it free while Philip is otherwise engaged. And the two then each abandon their homes embark on a road-trip along the coast - Philip in search of the artefact, and then when he finds it in search of someone who will buy it; Marnie in search of Philip, and then when she finds him in search of passage out of England and into the fog that surrounds in in search of the lost continent of Europe.

This is a beautifully written novel, deeply human, simultaneously compassionate and creepy, and one that speaks, subtly, to themes of Brexit, of gentrification, and of climate change. But one which also follows the manifesto of the weird that the author included in his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here:

"The space of the book wants to be big, empty, yet resonant, a space in which the characters don't even know they've lost their orientation. There's some kind of alien invasion or hauntological action or whatever going on in there, but even that's at one remove or maybe two. The space is loaded, but as the reader you don't know how to tap it for its resources; or complete it. You don't know what your side of the bargain is. It would be easier if you thought the characters knew the right kinds of things about themselves, but they so very clearly don't.
...
Weird text may not add up. It may not resolve. In fact it almost certainly won't. Nevertheless there will be no signposts. The author is not on this tour to guide you. The author's work has been to strip out affects, conclusions and motivations, then replace them out of order and at an odd angle. The way the picture is painted questions what's being painted; the things that are painted question each other; the internal lighting questions everything: any episteme you can assemble to 'understand' the Weird should fail; or even better, almost succeed."

And perhaps long-overdue Booker recognition will follow (addition: it did!!!) - the author in 2002 (SFsite link above) on why he had not been recognised:

'Like most writers whose origin is in F/SF, I don't engage my own humanity sufficiently to earn a visible X on that "literary map" you were talking about above. It doesn't help to be very good at something when the majority of readers, reviewers and literary editors ask of it with a kind of puzzled distaste, "Yes, but why would you do this?" ... To win a worthwhile literary award, you have to write about people: after all, that's what we are. But I wouldn't mind having a Booker nomination some day. Who wouldn't?'

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

4.5 stars rounded to 5.

A favourite passage, on the architecture of the iGhetti:

The iGhetti had solved - so they claimed - many of the issues we associate with the mathematics of Grothendiecke and Mochizuki.

By way of those solutions, they gained access not just to the astral plane, but to the even more complex and distant spaces beyond. Their relations with such spaces were controlled through architecture, either their own or that of the human builds that most attracted them. As a result, on a coast so fully dedicated to the arts - and thus to fresh new museums, performance halls and galleries - it had always been hard to tell these alien structures from their nearest human equivalent. The iGhetti were rarely, if ever, found in them, so what they were used for was, like everything else, a matter of speculation.

It was as if, initially at least, they had been determined to demonstrate - not simply to us but to themselves - that they had something of us in them. From Hastings round to Thanet and the North Foreland, new builds set out to combine the wafery values of the wasp nest with the disconnected perspectives of a postmodern waste disposal facility in Gloucestershire. They were often a silvery colour, or featured sheaves and fans of wavelength-sensitive glass. They redistributed light along mysterious channels. Some were sited on distinctive and highly visible points such as cliffs and head-lands, inshore islands or chalk ridges in the near hinterlands; others hidden in landscape folds or back streets. From whatever direction you approached, they most often resembled a cluster of buildings rather than a single one, viewed from an 'inexplicable' - that is, not anthropocentric - angle. You came upon them slowly, across a morning's walk, appearing and disappearing from sight like the lighthouses of a new kitsch, or, in town, discovered them inserted into sudden, windy, peculiarly graceful spaces between amusement arcades and Korean restaurants.

The judges' commendation

‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’

[Doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

Booker Longlist #6

1.5, rounded down.

I generally don't read much sci-fi, nor what has variously been called 'dystopian', 'apocalyptic' or 'climate change' fiction - and this reminds me why I DON'T. But my issues with this have less to do with genre than execution. I defy anyone to tell me WTF is going on here - although I concede that is probably largely the point.

I struggled to maintain any interest as there was no story and barely any characterization. The purported protagonist, Phillip Tennent, is pretty much a cipher throughout, until he does a 'Marion Crane' 3/4 of the way through . So I was relieved when Marnie takes over the narrative, even though she was fairly dull. When your most intriguing character is a shape shifting 'artifact', then we're in for a shitload of trouble.

But beyond that, the prose here is both weirdly specific, yet totally arbitrary - and I detest that style of lazy writing - basically weirdness for weirdness's sake and plenty of 'factoids' that are meaningless in the long run. I won't remember ANY of this 3 hours from now, which points to the magnitude of its failure.

I have a feeling both this and the execrable Helen of Nowhere were selections of Booker judge Jarvis Cocker - which makes me think the Booker needs to be more judicious in their judging panel selection (at least SJP last year had SOME bona fides!). Meow.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good books are back on the menu, boys! Harrison is my ride or die britbong, and this new novella features him in prime form. It's a Brexit novel; it's an internet novel; it's a "reality is glitching" novel. In this book, nothing feels quite right, and that's not even acknowledging the alien invaders, but rather the little day-to-day things. Something fundamental about reality is broken, but is it caused by the aliens, or are they only here as a byproduct of our brokenness? Honestly, as long as M John keeps writing new books, I don't care what's wrong with reality, let it stay broken for as long as he's able to keep rubbing my face in it. I gave this book 6 stars but if you only see 5, it's because you haven't yet reached iGhetti enlightenment.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some lovely writing but it is completely up its own arse. There’s using confusion and warped perception as a literary tool, and then there’s this. As soon as it started approaching interesting concepts, it swiftly turned away to then prattle on about nothing of substance. I understand that Harrison first introduced the iGhetti in a short story, it should have stayed that way. It shouldn’t be this much of a slog to get through a 200 page book.

[Maxwell]

Absolutely cracking up at all the reviews of this book! 1 star - 5 star, and everything in between. And of course, I fall somewhere in the middle with this one. I GET it, even if I didn't *get* it. You know?

This is definitely a book you would need to read again to 'understand' more if there's even more you can really understand. But it's a book that definitely makes an impact, leaves a mark, forces you to be present while reading it because it does require a lot of you--and at the same time, I think the best reading experience of this book would be to *let go* and have the worlds wash over you, like a tidal wave.

Essentially the book follows two people--Phillip and his aunt Marnie--in a near future England, on the Kentish coastline. This is after an 'alien' invasion of things called iGhetti have set down on earth and caused mass confusion/hysteria/blips in the matrix? It's unclear to them, and to us the reader, what exactly they are or have done or are doing still. Regardless, everyone just continues on with their lives and tries to pretend its not happening! (Keep Calm and Carry On). One day, Phillip, who works as a collector at the shoreline pulling stuff out of the sea, discovers an 'artefact' that seems to be a cast-off of whatever the iGhetti are doing and he plans to take it inland to sell, but along the way it begins to morph and change, causing him to further question reality and what we know of life, and everything.

It's weird, it's wacky, it's strangely violent. There's moments of absurdity that make you think "did that really just happen?" "What is real?" "HUH?!" And that's...the point, I guess. Because in ways, as out there as this book is, a lot of what it FEELS like is how the world feels right now.

In a post-Brexit world for the Brits, in North America, in any country where the right continues to rise to power, despite what we may (or may not) have learned from the 20th century. The 21st century continues to baffle, exploit, confuse, and disorient. This book feels like a morphing, shape-shifting, shimmering reflection of that, like an oil spill on the surface of the sea.

This is a book I appreciated (head) more than I Loved (heart), but I see its merits, definitely intrigued by it, and wouldn't be opposed to revisiting some day to see if I gain something new or different from it.

[Henk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
This feels like what you get if you vibe coded a 2026 British literary science fiction novel; some comments on our current concerns with AI and the climate, Europe being far away (Brexit) and the English landscape as eternal and observant
She wasn’t sure if she had killed the girl. It had been such a moment of confusion, so quick yet so endlessly stretched out.

Phillip Tennet, scavenger along the coast of post-apocalyptic Britain, invaded by water dwelling aliens(?) called the iGhetti (like the latest Apple product) who love the Square Mile in the City of London. The End of Everything gives me a bit of a sci-fi Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant vibes, with jumbled memories and a Britain in thralls of an unspecified crisis. There is a shapeshifting, regenerating and living artefact that seemingly induces humans into unexplained violence that for me screamed International Booker Prize nominated The Employees by Olga Ravn. Maybe some overtures of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, with nature and reality morphing into something strange, unexplained and if not hostile at least indifferent to humans. For me the ambiguity and opaqueness in this novel just didn't come together or ever really held my attention, even though the commentary on our current times is not hard to miss.

Quotes:
Age is an immense sadness which seems to be folded into everything

The visceral sublime

The world’s over he decided but that doesn’t matter because another one will be around soon enough

No history will remain at this site, only heritage, an interpretation of the past as much as an act of theft as the appropriation of another cultures arts and artefacts

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

I am not sure what to make of one, my second experience of reading Harrison after The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Harrison's vision of a broken future Kent is curiously undramatic but vividly imagined and surreal, with a less is more approach to explaining what is happening and what has created the crisis. I can easily see it making the Booker shortlist.

[Gaby | read.onrepeat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did I understand what I read? No.
Did I have a good time? Kinda.

But I can tell you this: this book is different and special.

We are dumped in the middle of a post-invasion version of our world. But the invaders seem almost beside the point. No one knows who they are or what they came to do. They just came one day, dumped a bunch of things in the ocean, altered reality, and never even showed their faces.

The result is bleak and strange. Things happen that don’t make sense.
It never gives you the big picture. The information you get is limited and distorted. As if the narrators were squinting. You can see one thing perfectly, but everything around it gets blurred.

Despite all that, I didn’t find it frustrating. In fact, I was even a little bit entertained 🤷🏻‍♀️
It felt like an exercise in letting go of my need to understand everything. Once you accept that the book is a little crazy, you start noticing other things.

For example, the writing is superb. Some of these sentences are so beautifully constructed that I paused several times just to admire their rhythm. They seem to have a music of their own. There were several moments when I thought: man, this author is smart.

When the plot and meaning are unstable, the language becomes the thing that holds everything together.

I don’t think this is a book you read to figure everything out. You better read it accepting that you won’t.




**Thank you Riverhead and NetGalley for the early copy. All opinions are my own.




~~Pre-read~~
NetGalley ARC and a Booker Prize longlisted.
I’ve seen so many mixed reviews but I’m intrigued 👀

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very atmospheric but also quite obscure, and unspecific. Usually I find this works for me but I couldn’t quite get a grasp on enough of what was happening here to really get into the narrative. Memory and the reliability of storytelling is a big vibe here, as are plenty of hot button doomsday issues. I was most captured by the sense that humanity had surrendered with negligible fight in this world, and that will be what sticks with me from this.

[The Speculative Shelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surreal. Ethereal. Eerie. Off-kilter. Awash in extreme, casual violence. Difficult to parse with little plot or story to cling to. At times, like if Jeff VanderMeer wrote My Favorite Martian. At others, so slipstream as to be ungraspable. Its strangeness is a feature, not a bug, and while initially intriguing, its opacity becomes overwhelming by the end.

I can certainly see how this would benefit from another readthrough, which likely boosted it among Booker Prize judges – but I’ll leave the rereads to them. Once was enough for me.

My thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

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[Jola · Rating 1 out of 5]

The ability to create an atmosphere that grips readers from the very first page and sends shockwaves through their emotions is a rare talent. However, when that happens to be a novel's only redeeming quality, something is seriously wrong. The End of Everything (2026) by M. John Harrison is proof positive of this.

I really wish I hadn't ignored the red flag right at the start; I mean that scene where a boy gets stabbed in the leg. A twelve-year-old climbs onto a roof and urinates on a woman named Marnie. When his leg breaks through the ceiling, she ties his ankle to a bed and cuts his femoral artery with a knife. The description is sickeningly vivid, believe me. Of course, I realize this scene isn't just violence for violence's sake, but I still wish I hadn't read it.

Following The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, this book is screaming proof number two that my literary taste is miles apart from this year's Booker Prize jury's. My motivation to tackle the rest of the longlist has dropped to virtually zero. It may not be the end of everything, but I refuse to keep punishing myself with books that only serve to annoy me. Don't let the size of M. John Harrison's novel deceive you. Yes, it's only 208 pages, but it felt as if I were reading a ten-volume depressingly boring series. I genuinely envy readers who can find delight in this novel. I rarely conclude that a book was a total waste of time, but unfortunately, this was one of those times for me.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is intentionally deeply disorienting. It reminds me of the old computer game Myst, where players are dropped into an unexplained world and have to try to figure out what is going on. Harrison provides hints about what has become of our world, but no direct explanations. There has been an invasion (of sorts) by otherworldly beings called the iGhetti. This event, called the Crisis, is already in the past. They have taken London, and the European continent has disappeared. In the seaside towns along the English coast, life goes on, but not “as usual.” Brutally violent acts occur, with few consequences. Properties of light throw up the illusion of buildings, or perhaps real buildings standing in another astral plane.

The storyline (if we can call it that) follows Phillip Tennant and his aunt Marnie. Phillip scrounges the shore and the sea for detritus from the Crisis, hoping to sell it. He finds “the artefact,” a leftover from the invasion, about the size of a human baby. It grows and changes throughout the story. It is a form of artificial intelligence fused with some type of lifeform (presumably of the same type as the iGhetti).

This book is not your typical science fiction, though it contains elements we associate with the genre. Harrison is deliberately disrupting the form. The world he builds is an uncanny version of our own, recognizable but altered by a cataclysm no one understands. One way to make sense of it is that the iGhetti have warped space-time itself. If so, the event is not just unexplained but unexplainable. It is outside any framework humans have for making sense of it, so they adapt the only way they can: by ignoring it. The book is about the human capacity to keep going in the midst of a new horrible reality, and its parallels to our own moment are striking.

I could probably write a longer review than the book (it’s only 200-ish pages) and still not come to terms with it. It almost demands a second reading (something I rarely do). I always appreciate books that make me think, which this book takes to the extreme. It deserves its place on the Booker Longlist.

[Robin Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, beautiful, and illuminated by a spectral coastal light. Ranks alongside his best work.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first reaction to the book, a quarter of the way in, was imagining it as a graphic novel, not the photorealistic kind, but more like Dave McKean fever dreams, certain sections as colour palettes. Each chapter initially appears as one composition, but cumulatively they refuse to settle into a single stable shape. Pun intended.

Reading it along with Bedlam showed me how two writers can use the same artistic vocabulary—painting, light, landscape, unreliable perception, dream logic—and produce radically different kinds of instability. Higgie spirals her protagonist into madness and Harrison into formlessness. Stunning works. I am in awe!

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's get the negatives out of the way first:

1. I didn't enjoy reading this book; it really isn't gratifying on any level (plot, character, description).
2. This book made me feel dumb.

So why three stars?

Well, let's just say, I feel like the author had something important to say about the human condition and I also think that a deep dive with other readers on literally a chapter by chapter basis . . .well, I think that could be super interesting and rewarding.

There's a lot of ways the plot could be interpreted. I like books like that as a general rule, so I don't want to be too hasty and dismissive. Unfortunately, I also don't really want to read it again without some volunteer fellow readers to discuss it.

Ultimately, great literature stretches one in some way . . .I prefer if it is in a way that makes the process of being stretched a lot more fun, but there's still some value in pondering.

My one take away, is this novel, at the highest level, recognizes how little man knows about his current circumstance and what is coming and how ultimately one of our greatest strengths is our adaptability. We carry on through it all, in part because what other choice is there? Even in the grimmest of circumstance, we carry on.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Psychedelic Dystopian Allegory, in the vein of Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. Additionally, this is the fourth consecutive title from this year's Booker Prize longlist that I have read which emphasizes elements of style and how a writer might apply them in unusual ways. The author's focus is on exploring emotional states and ideas rather than delivering a lucid plot with clearly delineated characters. The reader is definitely sent on a journey but without a reliable map, a compass, or any hand-holding whatsoever.

In this case, Harrison weaves a very odd, surreal tale that comments obliquely upon climate catastrophe, gentrification, food insecurity, Brexit, AI's infiltration into daily life, the corporate takeover of agencies serving the public, and the commercialization of Art (to name a few). The most chilling aspect of the story is the speed and facility with which society at large grows apathetic and accommodating to these changes.

[endrju]

If you're going to make me wade through pages upon pages of inconsequential prose, the least you could do is give the runaway AI a name that doesn't sound like a proprietary product from a certain well-known company.

[Scott Baird (Gunpowder Fiction and Plot) · Rating 1 out of 5]

What the fuck was that? Not so much a book as a collection of random words.

It's been a long time since I read a book and took so little from it.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

M.J. Harrison’s books are not easy to pinpoint. Underneath his deceptively easy writing style, a lot of themes wriggle their way into the reader’s subconscious and then after closing the book one realizes the impact of the book.

The scene is a post apocalyptic Kent. A substance called the iGhetti has taken over and is leaving its mark over everything it comes in contact with, thus land is filled with derelict houses with nature taking over: so far so Ballard.

The main protagonist Phillip is a beachcomber and he finds a continuously developing humanoid he calls the artifact. Phillip wants to sell it.

The other main protagonist, Phillip’s aunt Marnie is kicked out of her house (it’s one of the book’s best moments) and is wandering. The two meet and travel across the desolate wasteland.

I saw the novel as a Jan on capitalism, also the migrant experience, probably themes of separation (Brexit?) conspiracy theories. But I’ll admit if I read it a second time, I’ll throw out theories and have a handful of new ones.

There’s a lot of weirdness in End of Everything. Yet the writing is so unpretentious that, although it does not make it an easy read it’s not dense - just remember that the author like to confuse his readers so don’t expect things to be clear cut. For me this was an enjoyable, playful read which I’ll recommend for fans of the New Weird genre.

[Daria Ageeva · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurb made the book sound post-apocalyptic and interesting. However, I just didn’t get it, I felt like I was reading a book that the author has made specifically for super fans of an already established book series to give those readers Phillips back story. Any time I thought I was close to getting it something else would happen and I would ask myself what am I reading? I don’t even think I could explain this book to anyone. This one did completely go over my head, maybe I missed something.

It would have been good to have an introduction into how the world crumbled and what the iGhetti’s were doing and why.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, another strange one off the Booker longlist. And I am living. I had a copy of this before the announcement was made, so I was glad to be given the nudge to read it sooner, rather than later.


The question here is what is iGhetti, the substance/species/organism that has invaded London? This “thing” that morphs into different shapes and sizes. These “artifacts” that keep coming in on the beach.


This is a post-apocalyptic novel, but avoids the tropes that come along with the genre. It is bizarre in tone, filled with oddball characters and unexpected/unexplained plot progression. It seems like it is written more to provoke than to provide answers. I was fascinated with Marnie, an older woman with memory problems, who also totes around with a weapon in her bag.


Very early on, there’s a shocking moment that involves a child that immediately made me realize I was in store for an off-the-wall reading experience.


I think the novel is trying to encapsulate what it feels like when your greatest fear is reflected back at you. The choices you’ve made, the past that haunts, the disillusion with a society you no longer recognize, The terror of an unknown future. It’s got existential themes, but presents them in a way that isn’t obvious. The atmosphere, unpredictability, and ambiguity crept into my bones.



It isn’t my absolute fave, but it certainly is another banger off the Booker Prize longlist. More stuff like this, please.

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The world's over,' he decided. 'But that doesn't matter. Because another one will be along soon enough.'

Worthy of the Booker Prize, New Wave stalwart M. John Harrison writes a threadbare farewell to an even more threadbare reality. Not quite a suicide letter, and definitely not a love letter to the 21st century, this short novel becomes a harsh little soliloquy about the modern leftover world, once complacent and accepting of everything that came into our feeds and phones, accounts and calendars, now alternatively amnesiac and confused more often that not. Things that shouldn't exist, and can't exist, suddenly part of the Post-Post-Apocalypse, an ending that may have already happened many times before, or one we're still waiting for as if to be enraptured.

And where the hell did Europe go?

END OF EVERYTHING evokes and accelerates that harsh Covid-era realization of how fragile society really is when you look at it. He paints his England along the coast, where the iGhetti have infiltrated and rewired natural and virtual systems with little or no intent. There's the alien invader's essence materializing as gelatinous waste, fractals of light appearing high into the skies like "chandeliers", and even false architectures and evaporating landscapes tell an entirely different story at one angle, and at another, no more than what was leftover from before. Things have gotten so bad, we don't know which ruins belong to us, or them. Structures built by ghosts and abandoned for no reason at all.

However the iGhetti did leave many tangible things behind. Not on the lands but in the seas. Washing ashore is the floatsam and jetsam of their civilization (hints of the extraterrestrial litter in Strugatsky Bros' 'Roadside Picnic') Our main character Tennent finds one of these 'artefacts' on the shoreline, a self-healing humanoid unit with legs and arms, not quite robotic, not quite organic. Washing up on the shores like victims of a shipwreck are other things, some not explained, some elusive evoking images of sea monsters and krakens, shadowed but never seen.

In such sparse prose, Harrison evokes a world deeply shell-shocked by an alien invasion outside expectation. Never a writer to show things in the center, Harrison creates obstacles without really giving much detail: the Bad Patch - the memory displacement fugue associated with an astral layover, perhaps equated with a computer virus or a downloaded madness. The Square Mile on the edge of London - impenetrable to the eye but sounding of destruction. Are those WW2 bombers actually real, or are they just ghosting us from decades before?

For all its little faults and its propensity to abbreviate itself before even starting to show something important, I think this is the last New Wave novel, or the first of an even newer 'last' wave: New Worlds for Old Illnesses. Harrison has never been gentle and kind in his visions of the future, and now in his early 80s, that vision has only become more unapologetic and expectant. A masterpiece unwilling to be called such, a novel with no expiration date, a fugue more than a warning.

[LX · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating for this was gonna be a 3.5 as I was lost the whole time, but then when i read over parts again and sat down to gather my thoughts one night I thought well maybe that the whole point of the book??? ⭐

Going straight in I was just in the backseat of this book there for the ride, not sure what was going on but happy to be there.

This however does an interesting take on what people would be like if all this kicked off, sort of like well, shrug...best get on with the usual. Just get on with your life as there's nothing you can do, no changes can be made so whatever.

The ending of the book along with the whole idea of the people in the UK being just left to deal with this with no help is how I felt while reading it and that's what makes me think maybe that's the point, to almost make the reader feel just as lost as the characters in it.

Marnie had me cheering at parts LOL but I was also just sad to see her go through certain things and also witness the deterioration of her memory/mind.

Interesting take on using something so bleak, easily terrifying when we think about it and what we would actually do.

[Mark Redman · Rating 3 out of 5]

M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything is an ambitious and unusual science-fiction novel, but one that I found both fascinating and frustrating.

The story follows Phillip Tennent, who is trying to survive in a broken future Britain after a mysterious event involving the strange alien presence known as the iGhetti. When Phillip discovers an unexplained object washed up from the sea, he becomes drawn into the mystery of what happened to the world and what the iGhetti really are.

The book succeeds in creating a strange, unsettling atmosphere. Harrison explores big ideas about humanity, alien life and whether we can ever truly understand something completely beyond us. The world feels eerie and unpredictable, and the sense of mystery is one of the novel’s strongest points.

However, the distance between the reader and the characters made it harder to connect emotionally. The story raises many questions but gives very few answers, which some readers will love, but I found it occasionally frustrating. The ending is thoughtful and ambiguous, suggesting that the real “end” is the collapse of human certainty rather than just the destruction of the world.

Overall, this is a clever and atmospheric novel with some brilliant ideas, but its slow pace and lack of resolution stopped it from becoming a favourite. I admired it more than I loved it.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This bold, experimental and thoroughly enjoyable short novel concerns an alien invasion of Britain set in the near future.

The iGhetti have arrived, albeit slowly and steadily and in a variety of forms to British shores. Sometimes they cause havoc in daily life and sometimes they just observe from the perimeter. In the wake of their arrival, the government is crumbling, and a dense fog has descended on the whole of Europe. Various odd and uncanny objects wash ashore. It is a time of chaos, but in a small town on the Kent coast, the novel’s two main characters, Philip the beachcomber and Marnie the elderly artist, are determined that their lives should be affected as little as possible.

This is a gem of a novella, and one that refuses to be labelled by genre; it leans towards science fiction but it isn’t, also towards fantasy but it isn’t. Just as it settles into something like a more usual piece of writing something quite unexpected and weird happens, an elderly woman nonchalantly murders a teen, for example, and a moment later she is doing this dishes and admonishing the grandchildren - did that really happen? It begs for the passage to be reread..

It’s one of those short books in which every sentence, indeed every word, has a function, stressing Harrison’s theme of disconnection, a reality that is absurdist by its nature.

It’s one of the books of the year, the only quibble, and it’s not really that, would be with the title.