10 November 2026
Last night M. John Harrison won the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel The End of Everything!
We are delighted with yesterday’s win and couldn’t be prouder of our fantastic author for this truly remarkable achievement. A masterful work of fiction, The End of Everything has been a joy to publish. You can read more about the Booker win here.
The Booker judges said:
‘The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison.
It’s a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism. Central to the story are Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie, living on the south coast of England, a few decades into the future, some years after a mysterious catastrophe: an invasion of “iGhetti” (the “i” hinting at something digital, but you can’t be sure).
Social norms have been eroded, law and order have fallen into the hands of vigilantes, and you may well have a crashed plane lodged in your garden. People try to muddle through nonetheless, even making a show of business as usual (children’s parties and a morning coffee at a seaside café).
Some try desperately to make sense of what has happened. But one main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either. Phillip is landed with an “item” he found on the beach, a blob of jelly which quickly grows, develops speech and starts to tell his human minders what to do. This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.’
Read more about The End of Everything below.
‘I don’t think I’ll read a better book this year, perhaps decade’ OBSERVER
‘Brilliant’ TIMES
‘This drily witty fable speaks to our deepest fears’ TELEGRAPH
‘Haunting’ IRISH TIMES
‘This is powerful stuff … Thrilling’ MARK HADDON
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.
‘A work of genius’ NEW SCIENTIST
‘I loved this book so much’ SARAH JESSICA PARKER
‘At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying’ JULIA ARMFIELD
‘Visionary and brilliant’ CHINA MIÉVILLE
‘It will get deep into your bones’ CHRIS POWER
