A catastrophe has upended Phillip Tennent’s world, but no one knows exactly how. In “The End of Everything”, M. John Harrison makes this ignorance the starting point of the story: the disaster is not a puzzle to be solved, and the characters must carry on living in a landscape where familiar landmarks are slipping away. The novel won the 2026 Booker Prize, awarded on 9 November.
A changed world, but no explanation
The Booker’s official description places Phillip Tennent on the English Channel coast. He makes his living collecting objects washed ashore, artefacts cast up by the sea. The crisis began several years ago; its nature remains obscure. The government is barely functioning, new creatures inhabit the seas and Europe seems to have been “lost”, according to the prize’s summary.
Then Phillip discovers an object in the water that he cannot keep: a shape-shifting creature that he must transport inland. The publisher’s description sketches an adventure, but does not turn the catastrophe into a mystery with a promised solution. Instead, the object becomes a test of the character’s certainties: what can be understood about a world when the usual categories are no longer enough to describe it?
This opacity is also the principle Harrison championed after the prize was announced. In an interview with AFP, the writer explains that he wanted to imagine disasters that would not be “contained” or neatly packaged. The book, he says, is interested in the possibility that there may be no clear solution. The interview also mentions creatures called iGhetti, whose origin or purpose is known neither to the author nor to the reader. This refusal to explain everything is therefore not merely a piece of hidden information: it shapes the way the story is approached.
Disaster does not become a temporary interlude
The title promises “the end of everything”, but Harrison describes it as ironic. People continue to see one another, hold parties and act as if nothing had happened. This contrast shifts the focus: instead of following only the collapse of an old order, the reader watches habits persist in a world that has already been transformed.
This is an important distinction in a post-apocalyptic story. A catastrophe can serve as the backdrop for a new quest, with a clearly defined before and after. Harrison, according to his remarks to AFP, is more interested in crises that follow one another without any obvious boundary. He links the impulse to write the book to the 2008 financial crisis and says he placed the iGhetti in the City of London to connect them with this financial heartland. This reference anchors the novel’s imaginative world in an identifiable economic history, without reducing its creatures to an allegory to be decoded once and for all.
The book thus brings several scales into view: the shore where Phillip gathers the remains, the institutions struggling to function and wider upheavals whose cause eludes the characters. The unease stems less from a single threat than from the difficulty of drawing a line between events, consequences and the world’s new state.
A work of shifting boundaries
Harrison has been writing for more than fifty years and, according to the AFP interview, seeks to blur the boundaries between genres. Some critics present him as the first Booker winner to come from science fiction; the writer himself is wary of that pigeonhole. The prize’s profile describes “The End of Everything” as a post-apocalyptic adventure, while highlighting the limits of human understanding. These labels offer points of reference, but they do not sum up what the book sets out to do: bring adventure, satire and strangeness together without allowing any single register to dictate what the reader should think.
This movement between genres also matters in the context of the prize. According to AFP, the Booker has recognised an author previously associated above all with science fiction. Harrison said he was surprised by the award, which he had not expected. The prize makes an established approach more visible rather than marking a change of direction, in his view: that of a writer who refuses to let a genre set the limits of his book.
Harrison also said that writing the book over nearly a decade had led him towards an ending that was less depressing than the one he had initially envisaged. He says he found in it a “sense of possibility”. This shift does not contradict the opacity of the world described. Rather, it suggests that an optimistic outcome need not take the form of a complete explanation or a return to order.
Presented through its official summary and its author’s remarks, “The End of Everything” thus promises to be less a survival manual for life after the apocalypse than a story about existing amid changes we cannot fully name. The Booker recognises this proposition without erasing what makes it distinctive: its way of holding uncertainty, everyday gestures and the possibility of a future together.
References
- Booker Prize, official profile of “The End of Everything”
- RTL Today, AFP interview with M. John Harrison after his win
Dungeness, on the English Channel coast. Illustrative photograph.
