One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation

'Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk 'It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed' Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters' Club M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit. This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Many of our most prominent younger writers now recognise him as the most significant British writer of his generation. He is 'brilliantly unsettling' (Olivia Laing), 'magnificent' (Neil Gaiman), 'one of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English' (Robert Macfarlane).

"Infectiously engaging, packed with rueful wisdom and a distinctive sense of mischief" - Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year 2023

"What Wish I Was Here does triumphantly is to capture the feeling of living in the 21st century with all its anxieties ... wondrous and self-defining and defiant" - Guardian

"M. John Harrison, the best British writer you've never heard of, operates on the margins. Unusual and impressive, Wish I Was Here is also a writing manual of brilliance'" - Sunday Times

"This book is old school experiment, several unrelated episodes from a literary reality show, a kind of negative biography with a big author-shaped hole in the middle waiting for the reader to fill based on all the evidence around it. It's also one of the best books I've read so far this year" - International Times

"This is one of the most original books about writing that I have read, in part because Harrison is as profound about the art as he is helpful on the craft ... destabilising, witty, exhilarating - an important contribution to the genre's evolution" - i Paper

"So wholly original that a label doesn't do it justice ... Wish I Was Here will leave you bewildered" - New Statesman

"Harrison captures the stultifying and and generative landscape of post-industrial England better than anyone else" - Totally Dublin

"It's extraordinary. Profound, hilarious, precise, vagrant and speculative. And always intensely good company. The sort of book that makes writing seem possible again. (Or is it impossible?)" - Brian Dillon

"M. John Harrison's 'anti-memoir' is a masterpiece. Broad in scope and beautifully written, this unconventional autobiography contains some of the best advice struggling writers will ever receive" - Nicolas Lezard, The Spectator

"Delightfully oddball and original" - Guardian Book of the Year

"A stand-out playful reframing of the memoir form" - Granta, Book of the Year 2023

"Read it. You will want to press it on others like a mildly deranged Ancient Mariner haranguing those poor wedding guests as they try to go about their business" - LA Review of Books