The End of Everything

M. John HarrisonSerpent's Tail 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.I've only ever read a couple of things by Harrison but have been equal parts bemused and besotted by them and this newest Booker Prize shortlisted novel continues that noble tradition.On the beach, in a post breakdown Britain, Phillip fishes an 'artefact' from the sea, unwilling to dispose of it he embarks on a journey through a disjointed land that feels achingly familiar but entirely lost and unlikely. Meanwhile, on her own journey is his aunt, the fabulously callous, Marnie,…