The End of Everything - by M John Harrison (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE

A haunting apocalyptic adventure, and a formidable exploration of what it means to be human in a shifting world, from "one of the very great writers alive today." (China Miéville)

"A book not just about everything but about now." --Booker Prize Judge citation

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, an entire continent 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.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR M. JOHN HARRISON & THE END OF EVERYTHING:

"A towering genius of modern fiction." --CHINA MIÉVILLE

"Among the most brilliant novelists writing today."--ROBERT MACFARLANE

"No one alive can write sentences as he can... Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we're in."--OLIVIA LAING

"Reading it hit me like a truck ... I don't think I'll read a better book this year, perhaps decade."--HELEN MACDONALD, OBSERVER (UK)

"A Zen master of prose." --IAIN BANKS

"Harrison isn't weirder than most other writers, just better. Reading The End of Everything, you feel you're not so much reading as dreaming." --TELEGRAPH (UK)

"A memorable, haunting work...a world that's all the more uncanny on account of its proximity to our own." --IRISH TIMES

"M. John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard." ―NEW STATESMAN

"Surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying. . . M. John Harrison is a complete original, and one of the finest working writers we have." --JULIA ARMFIELD

About the Author

M. John Harrison is the award-winning author of many novels, including Climbers, The Course of the Heart, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Over the last four decades, Harrison has carved out a stellar career across a number of literary forms, and is acclaimed by such writers as Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Iain Banks. From 1968 to 1975, he was literary editor of the influential British science fiction magazine New Worlds. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2025, he was elected as a Fellow the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Shropshire, England.