The End of Everything by M.John Harrison

A 'Book to Read in 2026' in the Guardian, New Statesman, and Irish Times
A Best New Book in the Daily Telegraph, iNews and New Scientist

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

'It will get deep into your bones' Chris Power

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

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.