I feel like I’m late to this party, because so many people I know have been talking about it, but it’s actually only a 2026 book! So I am not late, they’re just early.

This book is brilliant and if you’re up for a world that’s just off from ours – in a very significant way and yet still the world is recognisably ours – you would do worse than just go out on a limb and read this. But if you need to know more…

This is a world where crossing a border might give rise to an “instance” of yourself. Not sure if you do want to go home from that holiday? Not sure if you want to take that overseas posting? Being forced out of your home by natural or human forces? Any of these might create an instance. Who is a real, live, human being, with all of your memories and traits up to that moment. They are you. But they stay, while you go – or they go, and you stay.

I’m sure you can imagine some of the large-scale problems, as well as the small-scale. For migration, as well as for families.

Soyoung instanced when she was a young girl; she lives in Korea, while her instance, who goes by Rose, lives in America – with the instance of Soyoung’s mother. Yujin instances when he leaves Korea for study leave in the US; they also live in those two countries.

Here’s the thing I didn’t mention: if instances meet, and touch, they will generally reintegrate. Again, you can probably imagine the large- and small-scale problems. What if one instance wants to reintegrate, and the other doesn’t? Reintegrating gives the person both sets of memories – imagine living like that!

And now, imagine the techbros rubbing their hands at the opportunities this affords: what about something to guarantee forced reintegration can’t happen? What about… well, there are all sorts of possibilities if instancing could somehow be managed.

Sublimation isn’t about the technological stuff, exactly, but it does run through the whole book: Yujin’s instance, YJ, works for the company who made MERGEBREAK (bracelets that should stop reintegration). And the whole question of reintegrating or not is at the core of the novel, so external efforts to affect that are pretty important.

This is a book about migration, of course: about choosing to migrate, about the consequences of doing so, and what it means to leave somewhere. And it’s about identity – how could it not be: what does it mean if you’re torn between choices? How can you reconcile with yourself?

I haven’t even mentioned the structure of the novel. First thing: large swathes of it are written in the second person. Bold choice! It means you (heh) switching between a Soyoung, Rose, Yujin and YJ – you say, you do, you think – and it makes the whole experience remarkably visceral. And when you (heh) suddenly flip to reading in the third person, it’s quite discombobulating. Which is really clever. Second thing: there’s a lot of asides about literature across the novel. There are references to a Korean fairytale, a Korean song, The Odyssey, and the Book of Genesis. The last two are what I know best, but they all suggest the same thing: in a world where instancing has always happened, how does that change literature? What if Odysseus instanced when he left Ithaca – what does that say about him? And what if – this one is the most challenging, IMO – the act of creating the world (and everything in it) was one absolutely epic example of instancing?

Some thoughts about the very end below the cut, but look – this book is just great, you should read it.

I just.

What.

Why have I read so many not-straightforward books recently?

Why do I read books where I’m really not sure that I’m smart enough to understand them?

Well, in this case it’s because so many people talked about this book that I got incredible FOMO and decided to finally take the plunge, even though I knew – from all that talking – that it was going to make my head spin.

And it did. Mostly in a “I think this is enjoyable?” kind of way, but… yeh. Spinning.

I could try to outline the story, but that would be something of a fool’s errand. There’s versions of worlds, or perhaps dimensions? Some characters maybe keep recurring across centuries. There are things hidden from mortal ken, and probably none of the worlds are our world, and things happened in the past that echo through to the future. You should definitely read Ian Mond’s review of it in Locus, because he does a better job of summing it up than I could.

So why bother writing this review? Really I just wanted to note, out loud as it were, how impressed I was while also flailing a bit to understand what was going on. Even through that flailing, I was drawn on, because the writing is just that good. And I felt hope that, even if I didn’t completely understand everything by the end, I’d at least have some sense of… completion, or resolution, or something. And I did. Not entirely completion, but certainly as though events and characters made some sort of sense, even if there were still gaps.

It really is excellent. Hard, and excellent. I can’t quite imagine where Chandrasekera will go next – anywhere, I guess.

I’ve liked everything I’ve seen out of Stelliform Press; they focus on fiction that centres climate change and how it affects the planet and people. Often hopeful, like solarpunk, but not in a blinkered, rosy-glasses way.

The overarching story here is that a spaceship is soon to take off, and some tickets have come available for folks who didn’t expect it. The question of whether to take one or not is driving wedges between people. In particular, between Seb and Jay. So the story is sort of about that. But it’s about more than that: it’s about community, and how a changed world can be understood, and how and why we tell stories – to understand what’s going on and to shape what’s going on.

Rather than being a straightforward narrative, Beker presents a montage of myths and fairy stories, along with ephemera like party invitations and graffiti. The stories are found in a book Seb has left for Jay. They remake old stories to be more appropriate for the changed world: Beauty and the Beast becomes What a Fish Looks Like; The Little Mermaid becomes Playlist 4Merx in Times of Sea Levels Rising.

Characters come in and out – mentioned in ephemera and then in a story, times looping in and out, so it’s sometimes a tease trying to figure out who is known to be where. It’s incredibly clever and I can only assume Beker must have created one of those enormous pin boards with string to keep it all together (literally or metaphorically).

I’m late to this party but I can see why folks were talking about it last year. The structure works really well – done with thoughtfulness, the inclusion of ephemera adds enormous depth to a world, and the design works beautifully here. I like Beker’s ambivalence about the state of the world: maybe leaving will be the right decision! Maybe staying and trying to make things better on this planet is the right decision! … maybe both are right, for different people. And I liked, too, the hints at community building and support. I’m increasingly being drawn to that sort of fiction.

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.