A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction

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 'It will get deep into your bones' Chris Power 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

"Dreamlike and baffling, The End of Everything elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity" - Guardian

"M. John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard" - New Statesman

"Confounding, brilliant ... What drives it is the tension from all that strangeness being reported in calm, often drily witty prose" - Times

"A work of uncanny beauty, tender and terrifying in equal parts" - Literary Review

"A bracing vision" - Spectator

"Reminded me of J. G. Ballard ... an addictive, obsessive and digressionary novel about the mundanity of post-apocalyptic life, lives we might be living already." - The International Times

"An eerie, speculative novel of crisis and its aftermath" - iNews Best New Books of June 2026

"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