The End of Everything Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide

About this book

On the Kent coast, in a Britain sliding into collapse and shadowed by a mysterious alien invasion, Phillip Tennant scrapes out an existence with his aunt. M. John Harrison's first novel in six years is bleakly funny and unexpectedly compassionate, less interested in the mechanics of apocalypse than in how people go on living inside one. Oblique and shimmering, it is a dystopia that feels pointedly about now.

Discussion questions

1. The book drops us into a collapsing Britain where a scavenger and his aunt get by amid a strange alien invasion. What was your first impression of that world, and of how the novel presents its apocalypse?
2. Harrison writes obliquely, letting the catastrophe stay in the background. If that indirectness tested you, what kept you reading, the atmosphere, Phillip, or the mystery of what is happening?
3. Phillip Tennant survives on the margins with his aunt. What did their relationship, and the daily work of scraping by, reveal about them?
4. The novel was called both casually horrifying and unexpectedly compassionate. Where did you feel each of those, and how did the book hold them together?
5. The judges called it a book not just about everything but about now. What did it ultimately seem to be saying about our present moment through its vision of collapse?
6. The alien invasion is never fully explained. How did that refusal to explain shape your reading, and did the ambiguity work for you?
7. The bleak Kent coast is central to the book's feel. How did that specific, ordinary English setting change the way you experienced a story of societal collapse?
8. Did this remind you of another literary take on the apocalypse, or a story that finds humanity amid ruin, in a book, a film, or life?
9. The book sits with how people keep living inside a slow catastrophe. Did that resonate for anyone at the table, given how the present can feel?
10. Who would you hand this to next, the literary reader who wants a smart, strange dystopia or a science-fiction fan open to something oblique, and who might find it too bleak?

Themes to listen for

• Living inside a slow collapse
• Compassion amid catastrophe
• The limits of understanding
• The ordinary against the apocalyptic
• A mirror of now

If your club liked this, try…

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Where to get it

• Check availability at your local library
• Find it on Bookshop.org

Practical notes

Best for literary clubs and adventurous science-fiction readers.

Content notes: Societal collapse and some disturbing imagery.