Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artifacts 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, an entire continent 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 artifact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
A fascinating, sometimes frustrating and thoroughly original new novel ... This book, a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing that can enlighten even when it obfuscates ... This grim but powerful book portrays the many incompatible states of existence, and the baffling collapse of time, that stem from extreme crises.
Harrison, as always, interweaves precise descriptions with disquieting lacunae ... Dreamlike and baffling, The End of Everything elucidates humanity’s disintegrating existence with strange clarity.
There is a grain of ambiguous hope in one character’s declaration that it doesn’t matter that the world has ended...but what I felt when the novel released me was more immediate. I felt the urge to go outside, to run around and shout, not to celebrate the novel’s brilliance (although I think it is brilliant), but simply to prove that, for now, something real still exists.
