This is a very difficult book for me to even consider reviewing.

How to talk about the plot? Well, it’s sort of post-apocalyptic – certainly there was a crisis some years ago, involving an alien arrival (… ish) and folks are figuring out how to live in the aftermath. Phillip is a beachcomber, and an object he finds one day becomes more than he bargained for. For a while we follow Phillip, and then we follow his aunt. They occasionally act, but more often things happen to them and they react – or don’t – and then the it’s the end of the book.

Are Phillip and Marnie “main characters”? Not really; certainly no one would be accusing them of having main character energy. I wouldn’t even comment on whether they’re likely; I didn’t get to know them well enough for that.

There’s not that much detail, but post-crisis British society was the aspect I found most fascinating. I’m sure that for people who live there, there are all sorts of resonances with their post-Brexit and -Covid world. Even from the outside I could see some of the points that Harrison is poking. The people who are resolutely unaware that anything has changed; the people living like everything has changed; the utter weirdness of towns that have been abandoned for no apparent reason.

This is not the style of book I tend to read for pleasure. It reminded me a lot of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation for that reason; prose that isn’t straightforward, almost certainly references that went over my head, and a narrative that left me with more questions than anything else. Annihilation is definitely weirder, and I think more oblique, but anyone looking for “a story” in The End of Everything is looking in the wrong place. I don’t think that’s why anyone would read it – and if you were misinformed about the sort of book you were reading, you’d either give up in disgust or hate-read to the end (don’t ever do that, it’s not healthy). I certainly don’t regret reading this, but also I’m not going looking for more in the same vein. It’s just not my scene.