From the book blurb:

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.

M. John Harrison has been publishing since 1965 although he began writing as a teenager in the 1950s He is a legend especially in the world of speculative fiction. At the age of 82, he is the oldest writer to have been shortlisted for The Booker Prizes 2026 for “The End of Everything” (published by Hachette India). The winner will be announced on 9 Nov 2026. It is a slim novel but it leaves one reeling with the immense possibilities that may exist in humanity’s future. The aliens, iGheti, walking around the community in a near-future south-east England are “monstrously sized, extremely powerful and strange lifeforms” of unknown origin and uncertain purpose. The protagonist, Philip Tennent, lives with his aunt Marnie in the coastal town of Dalston-on-Sea and ekes out a living by collecting – and endeavouring to sell – iGhetti “artefacts” that wash up on the shore. One particular artefact he finds has the potential to change their lives for ever.

It was a pleasure speaking on the TOI Bookmark* podcast with M. John Harrison regarding The End of Everything. This book really makes you think.

M. John Harrison, a genre-defying British author and literary critic. Harrison has been hailed by writers including Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane and Neil Gaiman as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today. He sold his first story in 1965, and in 1969 joined the staff of the UK speculative fiction magazine New Worlds, where he edited the books pages until 1978.

His novels include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989; Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007; and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction. A collection of short stories, You Should Come With Me Now, was published in 2017, and a volume of selected stories written between 1970 and 2020 was published under the title Settling the World.

He has reviewed a broad spread of fiction for the TLS, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the New York Times; co-authored a quartet of fantasy novels about talking cats; and ghostwritten on behalf of a legendary British rock climber. He was a judge of the Booker Prize 2022.

I had the good fortunate of interviewing him in early September. He was shortlisted for The Booker Prize the following week.

Here is the Spotify link:

8 Nov 2026

*TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 214+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA, Turing Prize, Magsaysay Prize etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ & Lin King, David Szalay, Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Damodar Mauzo, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, Sanjoy Roy, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Andrew Miller, Catherine Chidgey, Dr Rachel Clarke, Charlotte Wood, Megha Majumdar, Kiran Desai, Ken Follett, Philippe Sands, Victoria Bateman, Anuradha Roy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Danny Rensch, Anne Beate Hovind, Tayari Jones, Lyse Doucet, M. John Harrison, Luke Kennard, and Annie Ernaux.

It is available on Spotify.