About twenty pages into The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, an elderly woman is sunbathing on a balcony when a boy climbs onto her roof and urinates on her. He puts his leg through the roof trying to run away. She goes inside, ties his ankle to the bed frame so he cannot wriggle out, finds a knife, and kills him.
Then she goes back outside, lies down again, and is irritated that the shadow of the crashed aeroplane across the road has now blocked her sun.
I read that twice. Not because it was unclear, but because the prose does not change tone by a single degree. It is written in exactly the same voice as the paragraph before, which is about bread being hard to buy after nine in the morning.
That is the book. That is what you are dealing with when you pick up M. John Harrison.
What Is Actually Going On
I should say what the situation is, though The End of Everything takes its time and never fully commits.
Something arrived. They are called the iGhetti. Nobody knows what they are, where they came from, or whether “here” means anything to them. They have occupied the City of London, which sits there being shelled to no visible effect. Reality around the edges has gone unreliable, and people have started calling the soft spots bad patches, in the same tone you would use about a rough patch in a marriage.
Phillip Tennent lives on a Kent beach and scavenges the things the sea keeps washing up, which are the discarded parts of whatever the iGhetti are. His aunt Marnie is seventy, a painter, and losing her memory in a house parked under the wing of a crashed Airbus.
At the start, Phillip finds something the size of a baby. Over the course of the novel it grows, learns to crawl, learns to talk, learns to read in a single day, and starts stealing clothes from Oxfam because it wants to look nice.
Marnie Is the Best Character M. John Harrison Has Written
I want to be careful here, because I have described her killing a child and that is going to be the whole of her for some readers, understandably.
But she is magnificent. She is vain about her painting and scornful about everyone else’s. She misses air travel more than she misses civilisation, and can remember every flight she ever took while forgetting the word for a robin. And she carries her whole life in a canvas tote bag from a Buenos Aires book fair, and somewhere near the bottom of it there is a scatter of gold paper snowflakes from some Christmas decades ago that she cannot account for and gives away, a pinch at a time, to children.
M. John Harrison does not ask you to forgive her, or condemn her, or understand her. He does something much rarer, which is to write a woman of seventy as a full and dangerous person and then decline to have an opinion about it.
The Passage That Justifies the Whole of M. John Harrison’s Novel
In the second half of The End of Everything there is an evening when the ghosts of dead old men rise up out of the memorial benches along the seafront. They come out of the mouldy slats one and two at a time, wobbling, and then in their hundreds, and the wind takes them out to sea where they wheel and fold into a murmuration.
And Marnie stands there and waves them off by name. It goes on for a paragraph: goodbye to Bert Lee, goodbye to the emeritus professor of engineering who loved to read about ships by the sea, goodbye to Monty and David, inseparable and always in our hearts.
I have not read anything so beautiful this year, and it is the moment I stopped arguing with M. John Harrison and started trusting him. It comes out of nowhere, it is never referred to again, and it made me want to go and stand on a promenade somewhere and read the little brass plates.
Where It Falters
The middle of The End of Everything nearly finished me.
There is a character called Hampson, running an obscene operation up on the Downs, and we get a long stretch of his notebooks. Individually they contain some of the best writing here. Collectively they are a wall. I found myself reading with my eyes and not my brain, which is the exact failure state a novel this good should not induce.
And the second half deliberately loses momentum. Marnie drives up the coast with her nephew’s ashes in a biscuit tin, through seaside towns that are described as being interchangeable and then, faithfully, are interchangeable. I understand the intention. Understanding it did not make the pages turn faster.
I also think that apart from Marnie, nobody here is really a person. Tennent is a car, a temper and a beach. He is supposed to be the protagonist and I could not tell you one thing he wants.
M. John Harrison Is Not Withholding an Answer
What kept me going was realising The End of Everything is not withholding an answer. It genuinely does not have one, and it thinks the wanting is the interesting part.
Everyone in it is producing theories. The internet claims the iGhetti came out of the internet. The middle classes have developed a polite habit of not mentioning the bad patch in their garden. Hampson has an entire field of satellite dishes pointed at the wrong bit of sky.
And the nearest thing to a conclusion, when it finally arrives, is a single page suggesting they might be a mirage all along: a refraction of something on the other side of a horizon we cannot reach, and that we might be a refraction too. The lost continent everyone keeps staring out at, incidentally, is Doggerland, which really is out there under the North Sea, which is the sort of fact this novel loves.
A Word Before You Start
Please know going in: a child is killed early and casually in The End of Everything. There is torture and mutilation of living people. There is cannibalism. And there is dementia written from the inside with real accuracy, which if you have watched it happen to someone will be its own kind of difficult.
None of it is lurid. All of it is delivered flat. That is worse, in a way, and it is the point.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
The obvious next step is M. John Harrison’s own The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the Goldsmiths Prize and covers the same drowned England more briefly. Climbers is the one to try if the strangeness here defeats you. Outside his work, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is the closest cousin in print, and Anna Kavan’s Ice is the ancestor of both.
The Verdict
M. John Harrison is eighty-one. If The End of Everything wins on 9 November, he becomes the oldest person ever to take this prize, and having now read the book I think the judges’ enthusiasm is entirely earned. It is the most ambitious thing on the Booker prize longlist 2026.
It is also the one I would hesitate longest before recommending to a friend. I admired nearly every page. I was fond of very few of them. There is a coldness running through it that I do not think is a flaw so much as a decision, and whether you can live inside that decision for 250 pages is genuinely a matter of temperament.
I could. I am still not sure I enjoyed it. And I have thought about it every day since.
Something comes out of the sea and learns to speak, and nobody ever asks it the right question.