The End of Everything : Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026

Author: Harrison, M. John

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 18 June 2026 by Profile Books Ltd (Serpent's Tail) in the United Kingdom.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026A TIMES BESTSELLER'Dreamlike and baffling' GUARDIAN'Brilliant' THE TIMES'Extremely beautiful' OBSERVER'Bracing' SPECTATOR'Formidable' FINANCIAL TIMES'Haunting' IRISH TIMESPhillip 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'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' JULIA ARMFIELD'This is powerful stuff ... Thrilling and disturbing' MARK HADDON'It will get deep into your bones' CHRIS POWER'I loved this book so much' SARAH JESSICA PARKER