The End of Everything is a bonkers Booker winner

This year s Booker Prize winner feels less like high literature and more like a collective nervous breakdown, writes Harry Owen Gather together five unconventional judges, hand them 163 novels to whittle down to one Booker Prize winner, and you should expect a peculiar outcome. This year’s judging panel reads like an eccentric, avant-garde dinner party. Chaired by Cambridge classicist Mary Beard and flanked by Pulp front-man Jarvis Cocker, the rest of the band s lineup includes online-surrealist poet Patricia Lockwood, lyrical innovator Raymond Antrobus and cultural critic Rebecca Liu. A challenging winner was inevitable, but The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is totally bonkers. I read dystopia – it’s my genre – but this was too weird even for me. Set in a decaying Britain where London has been abandoned and the surviving population huddles in squalid tented cities along the South Coast, the narrative drifts across a wasteland strewn with crashed airliners and rusted