The story follows a man and his aunt who must muddle through on the south-east English coast in the aftermath of an unexplained disaster and the arrival of mysterious alien beings.
The author has said he deliberately omitted as much explanation about the background to the events as possible, in order to make readers feel the same disorientation as the characters.
He has said: “The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. It’s a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend.”
He added: “I’ve passed on to the reader some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters in the book as they face a future with the alien.”
That approach has led to a mixed reaction. The Guardian praised the book but said, external “it won’t be for everyone”, while the New York Times said, external: “The more we learn about the conditions of this novel’s broken world, the harder it is to grasp.”
The Literary Review described it as, external “a work of uncanny beauty, tender and terrifying in equal parts”, while the Telegraph said, external “you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming”.
Another Telegraph critic wrote, external that it was “ultimately, in both skill and humour, a cut above” the other shortlisted books.
“And in an age when AI overlords keep threatening to kill us, and the Government has told us to stockpile tinned food and bottled water, it is, for once, a novel that you can genuinely call ‘timely’.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, Harrison explained how he had “wanted to write a book which really satirised the present-day barrage of information that we all suffer, without the necessary tools to understand what we’re hearing and to analyse it and to have critical thinking about it”.
He continued: “So the whole idea was to build a disaster in which it was a disaster of explanation, a disaster of the failure to understand the world as it was now.”
The Booker Prize is an annual award for the best novel written in the English language and published in the year up to 30 September. It was launched in 1969.
This year’s other shortlisted books were:
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
John of John by Douglas Stuart
When the shortlist was announced in September, Dame Mary said agreeing on the final six had been, “to put it mildly, hard work”.
Another judge, US novelist Patricia Lockwood, said she had been “tossing books across the room” during judging sessions, while poet Raymond Antrobus described the selection as “a tussle”.
The other judges were Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, and journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu.
Speaking about the final judging session, Dame Mary told reporters on Monday: “There was a lot of discussion, disagreement and debate. But nobody stomped off.”
In a statement, she said the panel “spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist” before reaching a unanimous decision to name Harrison the winner.
