Description

A ‘Book to Read in 2026’ in the NEW STATESMAN, and IRISH TIMES
A Best New Book in the DAILY TELEGRAPH, iNEWS and NEW SCIENTIST
A GUARDIAN Summer Read

‘At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying’ Julia Armfield

‘I don’t think I’ll read a better book this year, perhaps decade’ Helen Macdonald, OBSERVER

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. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.

‘Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we’re in’ Olivia Laing

Publisher Review

M. John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard * New Statesman * The End Of Everything is at once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying. It proves (yet again) that M. John Harrison is a complete original, and one of the finest working writers we have — Julia Armfield The End of Everything, a novel of absences and apparitions, of things almost recognised and far from understood, has little to do with the details, and everything to do with the tenor of how we live now. It will get deep into your bones — Chris Power To take the boisterous trope of the “alien invasion” and render it into this visionary and brilliant investigation of anxious times is breath-taking chutzpah. Of which we are lucky to be the beneficiaries — China Mieville M John Harrison writes astonishingly on the page of course, but he must also be doing something else. This book is both a dream and the dream state itself. I don’t know what else to say – it feels beyond reading. Disturbing and yet revelatory. He’s changed the world here.” — Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project An eerie, speculative novel of crisis and its aftermath * iNews Best New Books of June 2026 * Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we’re in — Olivia Laing One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English — Robert Macfarlane With M. John Harrison, you’re never quite sure what you’re reading or where it will take you next. There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed’ — Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters’ Club M. John Harrison, the best British writer you’ve never heard of, operates on the margins. Unusual and impressive * Sunday Times * Future critics will find in his writing a distinct, clear-eyed vision of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century life * Times Literary Supplement * A towering genius of modern fiction — China Mieville