The 2026 Booker Prize-winning book, The End of Everything, by the 81-year-old prolific writer John Harrison, is in keeping with a Booker tradition of searching out esoteric and mostly inaccessible novels that are difficult to pin down. The jury was headed by a classicist, Mary Beard, who is known for her backing of such novels, and at least one other member of the jury has said that she had never heard of John Harrison before being summoned to be a judge. We cannot grudge the writer Harrison, who has stuck to his chosen lonely path, mostly ignored and unheard of, before coming up with this novel set on his familiar Kent coast. And then he went on to win the Booker, which he really did not expect, and........

© Free Press Journal