Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction ‘Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we’re in’ Olivia LaingPhillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.