The announcement of M John Harrison’s The End of Everything as the 2026 Booker Prize winner has left readers divided over whether the novel deserved to win. Facing tough competition on the shortlist, including Marlon James’ The Disappearers and Douglas Stuart’s John of John, this short work of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction has clinched the prize for holding “the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep”. Essentially a book in which no one really understands what is happening, neither the characters nor even the readers following their story, Harrison’s novel has emerged as one of the more divisive Booker winners. Harrison, 81, is now the oldest author to win the prize.
The novel, which the Booker judges said reflects “not just about everything but about now”, is set in a slow-collapsing, near-future landscape along the Kent coast of the United Kingdom. We hardly recognise the world inhabited by beachcomber Phillip Tennent and his aunt Marnie: strange creatures emerge from the sea, the government is dysfunctional, mainland Europe has been mislaid, and the media has collapsed. The novel opens with Tennent, who scours the coast for artefacts washed ashore, discovering a strange humanoid object “about the size of a baby”. He takes it to Marnie, an ageing artist who misses air travel from the “pre-disaster world” and “remembered mornings when everything was like high-definition TV, wrapped in the documentary sublime”. Once Marnie frees the artefact, the two begin their separate journeys along the coast.
The End of Everything explores the possibility of a world that doesn’t end with a bang but with a whimper, as though its collapse were simply an everyday, natural progression. Nobody knows where the iGhetti, alien-like entities that appeared following an unexplained catastrophe and are linked to Tennent’s artefact, have come from or what they want. The only thing we know is that the collapse of the world is somehow connected to them. “It’s always seemed important to know if we’re their [iGhetti] victims or our own,” says Marnie. Several theories attempt to explain their arrival: they have been associated with dark matter or the banking crisis of the late 2000s, or are believed to have emerged from the internet, or are even linked to the astral plane, from where they may have leaked into our world long ago.
What Harrison does so remarkably well is present a world with very little clarity through a narrative that is itself unclear, yet comes together as a comprehensive whole, almost like a dream—or a nightmare. It certainly makes for a difficult read, often frustrating the reader, who may find that two consecutive events seem to have little to do with each other. In a way, both the reader and the characters are trying to make sense of everything, of the end of everything
What Harrison does so remarkably well is present a world with very little clarity through a narrative that is itself unclear, yet comes together as a comprehensive whole, almost like a dream—or a nightmare. It certainly makes for a difficult read, often frustrating the reader, who may find that two consecutive sentences or events seem to have little to do with each other. In a way, the reader is as disoriented as the characters; both are standing on the same shore, trying to make sense of everything, of the end of everything. Harrison also resists conventions of every kind. The novel may have all the trappings of a post-apocalyptic novel, from alien life forms to climate and geographical changes, and political and social collapse, but it rarely follows the genre’s familiar trajectory. In fact, it introduces all these elements only to move beyond them, meditating on human existence in a world increasingly shaped by overpowering technological advancements. The iGhetti, which imitate human speech and behaviour, eerily echo contemporary anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence. “I wanted this book to offer a different shape: a catastrophe the nature of which is impossible to parse, and which continues unabated for the foreseeable future. In short, actual change,” says Harrison in an interview.
The book’s emotional core lies in the relationship between Tennent and Marnie and, surprisingly, the artefact they come to share their lives with. “[The artefact] was hybrid technology, some kind of biological gadget the iGhetti had released in numbers when they first arrived, which was no longer of use to them,” Harrison writes. As the novel progresses, the artefact takes on an almost human quality, driving a car and occasionally commenting on the people around it. Its growing presence also complicates our understanding of the iGhetti and their relationship with humanity. “It was as if, initially at least, they [iGhetti] had been determined to demonstrate—not simply to us but to themselves—that they had something of us in them,” Harrison writes.
There are sentences and descriptions that are at once fantastical and dreadful. Lines like “Ash-light filled the room”, “In the beginning—if there could be said to be a beginning…” and “You could tell they were actual children, not artefacts, from the natural way they wore their copies of parental styles” lend the prose a distinctly dreamlike quality. There is always a sense of confusion, but one that cuts deep. Certainly a difficult read, The End of Everything demands patience. But the more you sit with it, the more it grows on you, much like the iGhetti in Harrison’s world.