Review | 2026 Booker Prize winner ‘The End of Everything’ by M. John Harrison: the aliens are here

Booker Prize 2026 Can you explain what’s happening? This has become an increasingly valuable question to answer. To understand what’s happening is to piece the increasingly chaotic present together and, in the cracked picture that forms, identify the future we’re constantly moving into.

It’s an exercise in identifying which truths matter most at a time when truth is often the thing being contested, from social media platforms to debates in Parliament. And even when something becomes clear to you, and you cling desperately to it lest it fade away, the world itself moves on and you find yourself marooned on an island surrounded by more claims and counterclaims. Forget the information overload.

We’re in the confusion overload — and confusion lacks the capacity to clarify. There are so many truths that piecing them together into a coherent whole has become fraught.