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Few writers have reshaped British speculative fiction as quietly, or as radically, as M. John Harrison. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has dismantled genre tropes across science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction—earning accolades from the Arthur C. Clarke Award to the Goldsmiths Prize. Hailed by writers including Olivia Laing and Robert MacFarlane as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today, his work is instantly recognisable.  Beautifully strange, subversive and written with a poet’s economy.  
Now, in his latest, Booker-longlisted novel The End of Everything, he confronts the corrosive and alien presence of capitalism in a world inexplicably unraveling. Refusing easy answers or heroic arcs, the reader is taken to  an England where the disaster at hand is too vast, complex, and banal to fully articulate. A society where adaptation is the stuff of fiction and whose inhabitants can only think to keep going as an apocalypse of sorts rumbles on. It is eerily familiar stuff - a world unmoored from truth and made hostile by the reflex to exploit.
PRAISE FOR THE END OF EVERYTHING
‘M.John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard’ - The New Statesman 

The End of Everything elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity' - The Guardian 

'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' - Julia Armfield
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We hear from Holly Pester about her latest poetry collection, Cafés. Published this summer by Fitzcarraldo, it’s a series of dream-like narrative fragments, that explore the possibilities of friendship and love, the myriad ways in which capital invades our lives and a hope for connection that appears unnervingly bygone. 
Described by the publisher as both a ‘stylish, political intervention and an elegy for communal space,’ Holly’s writing is, as ever, resistant, loving, vivid and wildly funny - always running ahead of you, waiting as you turn the page only to lead you further on in.
‘Holly Pester’s café is a place to sink into the soft leather couches, eavesdrop, work and dream: a waiting room both strange and familiar, full of spillages (of coffee) and slippages (of language). A public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester’s brilliance builds this café up and invites us in to linger.’
― Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife
Music on this episode: Makaya McCraven - Standing on Shoulders 
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First up this month’s Sam speaks to Max Lury about his unsettling debut No Ghosts. After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend. Harlow, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos;  Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. No Ghosts is a novel set in new space - the eerie, boundless simulcra of ai and the dead air of a spiritless age. Unnerving and uncannily recognisable, it is infused from the first page to the last with the terrible weight of an elusive absence.
Then Lara sits down with Ghost in the Throat author Doireann ní Ghríofha to hear all about Said The Dead - an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page. In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs.
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On this episode Sally Hayden joins us from Beirut  to discuss her latest book This is Also A Love Story. Sally is a multi award winning journalist for her writing and photography, most recently winning journalist of the year at the Irish journalism awards in 2025. Her first book, My Fourth Time We Drowned won Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022 and Non Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book awards and was shortlisted for the Baille Gifford Prize.
The subtitle of This is Also A Love Story is 'searching for good in a divided world.' This search took Sally from Rwanda to Syria, Ukraine to Japan both documenting the horrors of conflict and natural disaster as well as the capacity for love that remained. It is a profoundly moving work charting the persistence of compassion and humanity in the face of unimaginable horror. 
‘Bringing us hope from dark places, this remarkable book is the perfect antidote to our times.’  - Christina Lamb 
‘Original and heart-warming… By finding beauty amidst ugliness, Hayden finds a way of making our fractured world whole again.’ - Lindsey Hilsum
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/this-is-also-a-love-story-searching-for-good-in-a-divided-world-sally-hayden

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The ancient town of Weimar looms large in German history; a crucible of democracy and dictatorship and home to Goethe, Liszt, Schiller and Nietzsche. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. 
Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new research acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler’s regime.  An unforgettable picture of lives and choices in extraordinary circumstances, Weimar takes us deep into the heart of the story of a town that dreamt of a better world and woke up to tyranny.
‘Katja Hoyer tracks the everyday acts of omission and concession in the face of ruthless wrong, showing how the compliant and the complacent ultimately undermine the brave.’ - Neil McGregor. 
https://www.thewavesbookshop.com/
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