Why Every Man Should Read Booker Prize Winner M John Harrison's The End of Everything

On Monday night, Booker Prize 2026 winner M John Harrison, 81, told a hall full of London's literary establishment, he felt like a "proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence."

It is the best line a man may have delivered in public all year. It contains the whole case for the book that won him the prize for The End of Everything-- a novel about people who don't know what is going on. The bones of the 200 page novel are simple. A catastrophe brings the British society down. Now the place is full of strange aliens. But on the Kent coast, a man and his elderly aunt carry on as best they can.

It is a short, strange and unexplained post-apocalyptic novel and it is the best thing a man can read right now. Here's why.

Set futuristically, Harrison's award-winning novel sees the British society collapse but nobody knows what. A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure, The End of Everything pushes readers to the limits of human understanding as the novelist deliberately strips out much explanation to create a sense of disorientation for the readers.

The book removes the thing most of us lean on the hardest-- the ability to work out the situation and take charge of it. The End of Everything argues the assumption around disasters and our ability to recognise it and be able to say what is happening. According to Harrison, we won't.

For a generation of men who have grown up with the idea that a competent man always finds the answer, The End of Everything is a humbling read.

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 obscured. 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.

Harrison's post-apocalyptic hero is no soldier, no lone survivor or a man with a plan as most books depict. Instead, he is a man who lives with his aunt and learning to get through the end of the world one day at a time. Certainty is the currency we often unconsciously trade in and Harrison's novel takes that instinct away.

While our culture's apocalypse fantasies are almost always about command, with nobody knowing the 'what' and 'who knows what to do', there's little command to give, little control to exert, little answers to explain it all. The novel makes a case for how masculinity holds up when the certainty runs out rather than the obvious reliance on survivalist daydreaming.

Making history as the oldest Booker prize winner, author M John Harrison has officially broken Margaret Atwood's long standing record for winning her Booker prize at age 79 in 2019.

Harrison started his writing career in the 1960s for a speculative fiction magazine and has since produced over 13 novels, five story collections and an anti-memoir spending much of that time filed under a science fiction label he dislikes.

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.