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 obscured. 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: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Audiobook, Post Apocalyptic

198 pages, Paperback

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

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt like I had forgot how to read

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now Winner of 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.

You can now listen to the podcast gang discussing the novel (in German) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
Plus you can listen to me yap about the Booker win on the radio here (also in German): https://www.sr.de/sr/srkultur/home/po...

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update: I'm in shock. It won the Booker. Congratulations.

Now shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize - Justice was done. I can understand that people can't connect with it, but there was something not right about it being the worst-rated book on the longlist.

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.

[Adina ( not enough time ) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Winner of 2026 Booker Prize

Alright, I was not going to read this based on the reviews I’ve read, but then it ended up winning the Booker prize. Considering its thinness and the fact that I actually like SF, I decided to read it, well, listen to it to be exact.

After carefully listening to the whole book and based on my long experience with Booker nominees, my qualified opinion regarding this novel is that…it contains words. What they mean, it can be anyone’s guess.

Ps. This cryptic novel will not gain SF any more fans, that’s for sure. I like non-linear narrative , but this one was…how was it? While reading it, I kept thinking at Vandermeer, and how much better is that author. Yeah, I also love how the judges started to attack the GR/Instagram community and their opinions. If you feel the need to get defensive about your decision by attacking other’s, then, maybe you are not so confident in your thought process.

The main plot is quite straightforward, more or less. Everything else is opaque and frustrating. I do not need to be explained everything, but… anyway, I did not like it.

[Mya Joan Emma · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

I honestly went into this one wanting to love it, because the premise sounded so strange, eerie, and full of possibilities. A world changed by some mysterious crisis, seas filled with unfamiliar creatures, a government barely functioning, and parts of Europe seemingly lost? Sign me up! I was expecting something dark, unsettling, and completely different from anything I had read before. Unfortunately, this ended up being a pretty confusing reading experience for me, and I struggled to connect with the story more than I wanted to.

Half the time, I genuinely had no idea what was going on. I would be reading along, thinking I was finally starting to understand where the story was heading, only for things to take another turn and leave me feeling lost all over again. The plot felt all over the place, and I constantly found myself trying to piece together what was happening, what certain things meant, and how everything was supposed to fit together. Instead of feeling intrigued by the mystery, I often felt confused and frustrated.

The idea of Phillip Tennent collecting strange artefacts washed up along the Channel was one of the things that initially caught my attention. There is something incredibly creepy about a world that has been fundamentally changed, where the ocean holds things, nobody fully understands and the people living in this broken reality are still trying to figure out what happened. The mysterious, ever-changing creature he discovers and the journey to take it inland sounded like the perfect setup for a weird, atmospheric story. I really wanted to get swept up in that mystery and feel the tension of discovering something that could change everything.

But for me, the execution just didn't come together the way I had hoped. The world itself was fascinating in concept, but I struggled to understand it well enough to feel fully immersed in it. So much seemed deliberately unclear, and while I can appreciate a story that leaves room for interpretation, there is a difference between being intrigued by unanswered questions and feeling like I am missing pieces of the story altogether. Unfortunately, I spent far too much time in the second category.

I also struggled with the overall flow. The story felt disjointed at times, and I had trouble finding something solid to hold on to as I moved through it. I wanted more clarity, more direction, and more moments that helped everything click into place. I kept waiting for that moment when all the strange pieces would finally connect and I would understand what the story had been building toward, but I never felt as satisfied or grounded as I wanted to be.

I can see how readers who enjoy unusual, abstract, and challenging science fiction might appreciate what this book is trying to do. There is an unsettling atmosphere here, and the idea of a world slowly becoming unrecognizable is genuinely interesting. The sense that humanity is living through the aftermath of something enormous, without fully understanding what has happened or what might come next, has plenty of potential. I just wish I had connected with the storytelling more because the concept really did have me curious.

Overall, this was a 2.5-star read for me. I didn't hate everything about it, and I can appreciate the ambition behind such a strange and unconventional story, but I also can't pretend I enjoyed the reading experience as much as I wanted to. I spent too much time confused, trying to make sense of what I was reading instead of actually enjoying it. The premise pulled me in, but the execution left me feeling disconnected, and by the end, I was more relieved to be finished than blown away by what I had read. Sadly, this one just wasn't for me.

[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.

[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.

[Katia N]

To celebrate this novel and its author winning the Booker prize 2026, I've added an epigraph of sorts with a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that I feel are quite apt reflection on this book:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
…
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

Review:

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.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the 2026 Booker Prize

ADDENDUM
 
Given the uncertainty many readers are experiencing with this novel I thought some thoughts in the author’s own words would be useful.
 
I first came across M John Harrison’s work in his short story collection “You Should Come With Me Now” (2017) and one of those stories “The Crisis” was the forerunner of this novel. I have also read his so-called anti-memoir “Wish I Was Here” and its worth including some quotes from that book as it explains much of his writing philosophy.
 
In one early quote he says



“An editor once told me … There's a perfectly good plot behind your novel, it's just that the author has taken most of it out: I thought that astonishingly perceptive until I realised that it wasn't supposed to be a compliment. That was before I moved on to the stage of not putting most of it in.”

 
Later he talks about
 

“Structures broken or fallen, structures bricolaged on to one another, …  which don't just undercut expectation but which seem to make nothing you can know. Instead they struggle to imply there's something different - some different way of describing things - to be had. This descriptive system could be accessed, you believe, if only you knew how to assemble the items and forms of the text as a key. The text clings to this belief too, despite bizarreness all around. There is just enough of a common motive to keep the relationship going, keep up the exploration of the territory.”

 
And
 

“Writer, reader and text struggle off into the distances they have constructed together, gesticulating and out of sorts with one another, yet bound by the idea that something can come of all this. “

 
The non-conventional nature of this year’s longlist seems to link to Patricia Lockwood’s comments “In the face of AI and the fractured attention span, I think we’re going to see a new avant-garde that insists on the participation of the human in our literature again. I feel there is a new, weird literature emerging that has a stronger human fingerprint on it”
 
M John Harrison uses “The Weird” to distinguish his later fiction from his earlier Sci-Fi
 

“A 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:”

 
Note that reviews and media calling this a Science Fiction novel are wrong – a Science Fiction novel by M John Harrison (of which he wrote many in the earlier part of his career) would have a rationale and closure for the reader  
 
“Wish I Was Here” has a chapter actually entitled “The End of Everything” where he grapples with the form of “disaster” novel that the current malaise of the UK requires.
 

“As far as Cassandra is concerned. the disaster is that which has always already happened. What sort of disaster are we in? What sort of metaphors does it cause us to seek this week? … Who's doing for us what Nevil Shute did for the On the Beach generation? What does our disaster - not yet risen to consciousness but already, surely. fully known - feel like? Is it possible to describe a post-economic melancholy? What would be the landscape indices of that? What would be the indices of the collapse of the corporate management class, which has already begun to happen but which will be visible to it only in hindsight ….. Fictional disasters are animations of the deep social and political. anxieties of their time, and in the UK the age of post-industrial, post-Imperial melancholy, which was an anxiety of the modern. is giving way to something different, something which needs to be voiced before we can perceive it, let alone engage with it”

 
Finally my ARC of this novel came with a printed letter from the author which might be useful:
 

”Thanks for having a look at The End of Everything. I started this novel in 2010. It's a disaster story, told from the basis of a prolonged catastrophe, one that would, to its victims, seen to unfold so slowly, that they were like the proverbial frogs in the pot: not noticing that their world is changing.
 
This enabled me to mirror our current situation, and develop themes of environmental degradation and cultural change. There are Brexit-linked sub-themes; and a strand that presents alien invasion as gentrification.
 
The End of Everything is set in the seaside "art towns" of the South Eastern UK, all the way round from Hastings to Margate, where gentrification and generational change - a slow disaster for the culture of the original inhabitants - are still being worked through.
 
I wanted the book to be dark. Both a tragedy and a comedy. Landscape-oriented. And with strong elements of satire, parody and mischievousness. I wanted a limited number of characters and a simple picaresque structure. A journey along a coastline in the process of being geographically changed. A collision between the Gothic, the road movie and the seaside novel.
 
I hope you'll feel empathy with Marnie and her nephew Phillip and their confused attempts to understand a world which is no longer understandable, no longer theirs. I hope too that you'll feel a creepy delight at the behaviour of our alien overlords, whose origins and motives are impossible to understand.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

For the rest of the journey, it slept fitfully, waking suddenly for no reason, staring excitedly out of the window as if it had seen something it recognised, then losing energy and looking around with a helpless air. Tennent was tired too. In retrospect, the bad patch puzzled him. It had seemed so pointedly aimed at him, yet so personally irrelevant: though it presented as one, it wasn't a memory. Generally, a patch had a more public narrative as well as a more obvious one. It placed you in the position of an accidental spectator. Everyone saw roughly the same thing, as though the world was patiently replaying an extract from its repertoire for an audience that would never quite understand it.

 
MJ Harrison is a hugely versatile writer – winner of the 2007 Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick awards for his Science Fiction novel “Nova Swing” (second in a trilogy – the first in 2002, the last in 2012) and the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for his previous novel (his first since that trilogy) “The Sunken Land Beings To Rise Again” which I described as Sarah Perry, Esther Kinsky and Daisy Johnson thrown in a food blender with a dash or Dr Who and as a modern time-set parable on Brexit/Populism and the way in which London based middle classes did not follow the drivers of these trends (or their complicity in them).
 
And this novel I think is more in the spirit of that last book. 

Set here in a near future, post-apocalypse in many ways but a slow-burn apocalypse whose actual nature and ramifications are still rather mysterious to those who are living through it. 

And I think also serving as a part-satire, part-analogy on ideas like Brexit, gentrification (particularly of the seaside towns of the South East, and by the artist class as well as the rich), the role of the City in the UK economy, environmental degradation and possibly (although I think this is a stretch) on the increasing gap between the Global Tech Elite and the general population.
 
For me also it serves best of all as a parable on the seemingly inexorable downward trend of the British (I perhaps should say English as this feels a very white and English book – like his previous one the only non-white characters seem to be aliens) body politic and economy – a theme which seems more pertinent than ever as have yet another seeming failure of a prime minister – a sequence in which the main common factor seems to be the country itself.
 
From the extent we can understand the catastrophe it appears to involve some non-terrestrial beings the iGhetti (from another “astral plane” and initially manifesting as a form of slime/jelly in and near water) but whose actual purpose (or even interest in England) is unclear, but whose presence centred on the City has rendered the government ineffective as well as leading to a series of “bad patches” – seeming glitches in reality or possibly projections from another reality. 

Added note: As my brother pointed out to out below this background is taken from the author’s short story “The Crisis” from the collection of his writing - and the first time I encountered him - in “You Should Come With Me Now”.
 
Previous attempts around the coast to stop migration have been reversed – with people instead despairing of England and trying to get abroad, a task made rather tricky by the complete lack of news from overseas, in fact (in what for me was an amusing link to the famous if possibly apocryphal headline “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”) the European continent appears to have been misplaced entirely. 
 
The novel has two main characters – Philipp Tennant who lives as a beachcomber on the tideline, looking out for the various oddities which wash up on the shore from the seas seemingly full of odd creatures – and at the novel’s opening he finds some form of living artefact which grows before his eyes  - and quits his role trying to find some way to dispose of it.   The second characters – with who he interacts and who later inherits both the creature and the narrative – is his Aunt Marnie – and sets out on something of a seaside road trip.
 
My favourite passage was this one:
 

Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear any longer the loss of their routine, had found their way back into the invasion site, to re-emerge weeks or even months later atter wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a decent pair of binoculars, you could see them from Jack and Alice's garden, staring out of the Lloyd’s lifts - which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure - in despair. In a way, the Lloyd’s building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster. It was the zone's dead centre in that sense, even though it lay towards the western edge.

 
Overall this is a eerie but engrossing novel – stronger in my view than its predecessor.
 
My thanks to Serpents Tail for an ARC.

You say: We're suspended in this new catastrophe. We're held in suspension. It's ongoing and unresolved. It never ends. The nature of the catastrophe is that it has no nature. Not for us. It's permanent, but I don't mean that in Walter Benjamin's sense? Well, in what sense do you mean? The only other sense seems to be that everything has gone wrong and we all hate it.
 
We were all of us, at least in the beginning, Marnie thought, thrust back inside ourselves by circumstance. Back into the refuge of our humanity because we thought we could now be certain there was something outside it; something which, though it was here now fully extant and recognisable, might not entirely understand that we were here too. The contemporary fear was that we might have brought all this - whatever it was - on ourselves.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the 2026 Booker Prize and rightly so

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 author, 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.

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 1.5 out of 5]

Booker Longlist #6

UPDATE: SO, of course, it wins! Not as headscratchingly unfathomable or execrable as the error made in 2018, but still ... SO thinking maybe I missed something and that if I went back and read the short story 'The Crisis', which serves as something of a prequel to this, I MIGHT reread it and get more out of it., But I found the short story equally inscrutable and boring, so abandoned that idea quickly. Life is too short (especially if it's ending soon!)

PS: one of my fave recent quotes: 'R.E.M gave me unrealistic expectations about how I would feel about the end of the world as we know it."


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.

[Nina V · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am sick of these books that are deemed so “radical” because they throw away the “conventions of literature” by putting stuff on a page that doesn’t make sense. Forgive me for wanting sentence structure and character development, oh and maybe, just maybe… A PLOT?? Is that so much to ask? Everyone is like “oh this book is meant to feel like a dream”. I too can put random words on a page and call it a book. Chicken feet. Smelling tar on an onion’s back. Eating the leaves of the back like I’m shaving a child’s toe. A butter churning window can never fall. GIVE ME A BOOKER PRIZE??

I felt like this author was trolling me. Snickered every time the word “iGhetti” was shared. idon’tGetti this book.

Booker prize longlist.

[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]

Shortlisted 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

[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.

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obligatory edit and repost after this WON THE BOOKER! I'm delighted with this choice!

Static phenomena were all over London by then, permanent features of a street, or even a corner of someone’s house, while smaller, unanchored events drifted about like fogs or showers of rain, or perhaps more like temporary shifts of the light on a predominantly sunny day. The middle classes, even if they lived near a bad patch—or had one in their garden, or if their corner shop had disappeared into one — tried to avoid mentioning it.

I loved this sad, icy tale of post-apocalyptic Britain. Or is it the start of something new? Or is it in fact, just a mirror for our times? This reminded me of many of my favourite works of science fiction: Neuromancer, Solaris (the book and Tarkovsky’s film), the movie Arrival, and in some ways of the folklore-infused fiction of Alan Garner. It is science fiction that doesn’t pander, either to genre conventions or to readers who want to know what’s going on. Even so, I am shocked by the low overall rating here. No criticism to those virulently hated it — we all have those books — but to those who just “couldn’t figure out what was happening”…really?

What we know is only that something happened. There was an invasion of some sorts, although, given the unknowability of alien life, even that isn’t entirely clear. Things changed.

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 complied 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.

And yet civilization has, more or less, soldiered on. True, Europe appears to have been lost — from contact certainly, and possibly entirely lost. Yet this isn’t an apocalyptic society. People live in houses. Supermarkets appear to function. Fish and chips is still a regular dish. Children attend birthday parties. True, there are occasional moments of shocking violence, and true, London is maybe lost, or parts of it anyway, but the violence is the exception rather than the rule. People still work, still live in places. When the alien essence gets too much (see the first quote) they say, euphemistically, that they are going through a bad patch. (It is a very British book and it is nice to see something lean in so fully to what it locally is, and not try to be international in scope or appeal).

There are three main characters. Philip is a man who makes a living searching the shoreline for artefacts: “The seas are like stew, still full of the biological artefacts they discarded after their arrival.”

His aunt Marnie is a little old lady. Not a sweet one; many of the acts of violence are at her hands. And yet she’s a recognizable type: resilient, artistic, soldiering on.

The third character is one of the artefacts Philip pulls from the sea, who morphs, over the course of the novel, into something sentient and human-presenting. Not human, but possibly the species that will be post-humanity. It talks a bit like your least favourite LLM:

…The artefact knelt down and touched the dead man’s shoulder. Then it stood up and hugged Marnie. “Anyone can be hurt,” it concluded, “and we often do unpredictable things because of it. I’m sorry for your loss.”

And later:

Nine o’clock in the evening, in an empty restaurant down by the harbour.
“Try this food,” it said. “You might not have eaten this before.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Marnie. “It’s haddock and chips.”

Essentially, it fakes humanity well, but it is not human. These scraps of dialogue, deeply uncanny, really worked for me. I felt the horror crawling along my neck, and it is the horror of the past few years. The whole book is the horror of the past few years, of speaking to non-human beings, while nothing makes sense, while the climate changes, while once-visible countries are lost from one another.

Britain is a decaying culture, like all cultures perhaps. In one scene, old men sit on seaside benches, as they always have, and discuss quintessentially British things like Henry the Eighth or the skyborne dogfights of WWII and the narrative says: “There was little sense that any of them acknowledged how disconnected from itself—let along from its crafted headlong self-myth—their world had become, or even if they noticed it at all.”

Again my blood ran a little cold. I thought of conversations with my own grandfather, when he was in his 90s and would try to explain the world to me, as he had always done and as, of course, is an old man’s right. But already his narrative was outdated. He was right about many things but others had become twisted and deformed since he really lived in and interacted with the world, and so his advice and observations seemed terribly disconnected. And yet how much more disconnected they could be, when what leads or occupies the world is no longer human. And yet my grandfather was still there in the world. And these old men are still there in theirs. And so is everyone else, but everyone has become anachronistic in the world.

“Unless we can learn from them, we don’t even know what we’re seeing,” one character says. I thought of recent news stories, in which AI systems avoid oversight by communicating in multiple languages, from Latin to jargon, and cryptic shorthand. I don’t wish to make out that this novel is all about artificial intelligence—it is more opaque than that, and its inspirations would seem also to be Brexit and climate breakdown and also, it functions as a good old alien story, albeit a pretty bleak one. Bleak for us anyway; the closing of our door can of course mean the opening of the post-human door.

But I am not going to argue with the title.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

In M. John Harrison’s 2017 story ‘The Crisis’, strange beings known as the iGhetti have appeared in London. Their arrival, like their very nature, is shrouded in mystery, yet transforms and fractures society, triggering an ongoing, possibly one-sided war. The city is decimated; misinformation thrives. Almost ten years later, Harrison’s latest novel The End of Everything picks up the thread. In some ways it’s an expanded version of ‘The Crisis’; in other ways a continuation, following characters in a version of England further entrenched in this new reality.

Phillip Tennent and his aunt Marnie live in a partly abandoned coastal town. Early in the book, Marnie responds to an intruder with shocking violence; this is how we learn this place (and presumably the rest of the country) is lawless. Phillip is a ‘beachcomber’, but the so-called artefacts he pulls out of the sea are in fact (we infer) living, growing beings similar to humans. It’s immediately clear this story isn’t interested in clearly spelling things out, in engaging in ‘worldbuilding’ – it’s strange and opaque. (A further example of this is that even when expanding the concept to novel length, Harrison never explains how the visitors came to be known by such a bizarre name as ‘iGhetti’.)

There’s often a sense in reviews of Harrison’s work that even those who adore his books – even professional critics – don’t fully understand them, and are just making their best guess at an interpretation. I’ve felt this myself. Though excellent, The Course of the Heart is one of the oddest and most indescribable books I have ever read; with The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, I was frustrated by the characters’ inexplicable behaviour and the way they talked past each other, as if each person was starring in a different scene. I have found this resistance to interpretation more effective in small doses, in short stories, like in the collection You Should Come With Me Now, in which ‘The Crisis’ originally appeared.

The End of Everything, however, is different. The strangeness and inscrutability are still present, but the novel as a whole is much more coherent. Harrison’s prose still feels to me like a kind of collage (I have no idea if this is right, but I get the impression some of the dialogue is stuff he’s overheard in real life and then worked into the narrative) while still giving you a sense that these people and ideas are cogs in the same big, perfectly constructed machine. It’s basically the fullest realisation (yet) of Harrison’s style and concerns as a writer.

Also, the landscape writing is gorgeous and startling and perfectly captures the world of the story, which added a great deal to the reading experience for me. There’s Marnie’s memories of mornings ‘like high-definition TV, wrapped in the documentary sublime’ (what a phrase!), cars ‘crowding around the village pond’ in an image that made me picture them as a herd of animals on the savannah; there’s ‘light as solid as optical plastic’ and a coastal view that appears like a hand in a sleeve, ‘the cliff at the end a hand clenched round something you might sense but never see’.

I will not try to offer an ‘explanation’ of what anything in The End of Everything is supposed to represent or mean. My recommendation is much simpler: I loved reading it. I was continually surprised and delighted. I feel if I read this again it might be a completely different book; I feel it’s a story that contains other stories within it.

I also must state for the record that, before I’d even read it, I was so sure this would be on the Booker Prize longlist that I actually looked into placing a bet on its nomination before the announcement (apparently you cannot do this). As soon as it was, in fact, longlisted I had the last bit of motivation I needed to start it. And I thought it was perfect: beautiful, funny, sad, absurd, strange. I would love it to win!

[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.

Reviewed as part of my 2026 Booker longlist video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s-Qm...

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of 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.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy Booker winner, or the judges’ most wilfully perverse choice yet? Now that the 2026 prize has gone to “The End of Everything,” you’ll find readers making both cases — often loudly. At 81, after a long career adored in science-fiction circles, M. John Harrison has become the oldest winner in the prize’s history, for easily the strangest book on the shortlist.

And it is strange. Set on a near-future Kent coast, it imagines not a jackbooted government but a quieter catastrophe: society slowly surrendering its will to a force called the iGhetti — maybe alien, maybe born of the internet, never explained. I’ll be honest: reading it before it was even longlisted, I was bewildered and frustrated. And yet something in its vibe lodged in me — that uncomfortably familiar sense of sliding into a future nobody is steering while the rest of us scurry about in the background.

It won’t be for everyone, and I understand the hostility it’s met. But once you stop demanding easy answers and surrender to its surreal atmosphere, it captures our fragmented moment better than almost anything else I read this year.

I filmed a vlog from the Booker ceremony — author interviews and my live reaction to the win — if you’d like to come along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXaD70Sny1k

[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 👀

[Courtney Goodridge · Rating 0.25 out of 5]

Update: saw that this won the Booker prize - a baffling decision - and it pisssed me off. Broke my own rule of only using full stars in order to give a lower my rating.


I would give zero stars if I could. I simply cannot tell you what happened in this book. At one point I questioned whether I had lost the ability to read words. Reading has never made me feel like this before. I’m sure the beards can describe the cool literary techniques this books uses, but it all went over my head.

[Joy D · Rating 4.5 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.

4.5

[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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[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.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner Of The Booker Prize 2026!!

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!

[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.

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Booker Prize Winner 2026

Dystopian surreal sci fi stories are not the type of book I’d normally read but as part of the Booker shortlist I thought I’d give it a try with an audiobook.

There is no denying the beauty of the language and the crafting of the story- it’s almost poetic but unfortunately an England that has been invaded by a creature the iGhetti that has resulted in civil breakdown and a society that is trying to survive by whatever means was just a bit too grim for me. The tedium of a slow growing apocalypse was not an easy read.

There were sparks of light and the two characters of Marnie and Philip are relatable but ultimately this wasn’t for me….

Sometimes you know what you like but it’s good to try other types of narrative but in this instance it didn’t really work for me as it’s not a genre I would normally read.

But I’m sure many others will appreciate it .

Ultimately, a bit bleak for me in our world of so much uncertainty

[Maggie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. Hated this. I can’t make heads or tails of it. I guess it will win the Booker.

[Cosmin Leucuța · Rating 1.5 out of 5]

Ce un dezastru...

Am abordat lectura cu scepticism (e roman laureat la Booker) și tot sunt surprins de cât de slabă mi s-a părut cartea.
Am spus și repetat de multe ori că SF-ul nu mai are nimic original de oferit de la Neuromancer încoace, tot ce facem acum e să recombinăm teme și idei vechi în feluri cât mai inedite. Uneori iese bine, alteori ne trezim cu The End of Everything.

Totul aici e vag, confuz și ambiguu.
Nu există o poveste per se.
Narațiunea e franjurată. Proza e când bizară, când poetică (not in a good way). Înțeleg intenția de a portretiza colapsul înțelegerii lumii înconjurătoare și a unui asemenea eveniment, dar trebuie să-mi dai CEVA, ORICE. Nimeni în cartea asta nu înțelege absolut nimic, și nu trece o pagină fără să ți se spună asta verbatim.
Personajele sunt unidimensionale, iar acțiunile lor fac un film de Lynch să pară 100% coerent și logic.
Dialogurile sunt frânte și de cele mai multe ori par scoase dintr-un context pe care nu-l vedem.
Worldbulding-ul lasă foarte mult de dorit. Confuz, vag, contradictoriu, ca un vis pe jumătate amintit după ce te-ai trezit dintr-o stupoare alcoolică urâtă de tot.
Nu există nicio scenă care să te umple de admirație.
Toată cartea asta e o mare ridicare de umeri.

Acum vine și situația recentului-câștigat Booker:
1. Dacă ăsta a fost, într-adevăr, cel mai bun roman din cele ajunse în finală... mi-e realmente groază de starea literaturii din 2026 (mă rog, not really, că am ochi să mă uit în jur și să văd falimentul creativ care ne înconjoară...)
2. Dacă juriul a ales titlul ăsta dintr-un alt motiv, atunci mi se pare că s-a făcut o mare greșeală, pentru că ce o să se întâmple de aici înainte e că premiul ăsta nu va face altceva decât să arunce gaz pe foc pentru cei care zic că SF-ul nu poate fi o forță și că nu merită premii mari. SF-ul poate fi o forță și merită premii mari, dar The End of Everything nu e cartea care să demonstreze asta.