Infinite Private will publish in Portugal winner of the Booker Prize 2026

O Infinite Group Private will publish in Portugal “The End of Everything”, British writer M. John Harrison, winner of this year’s Booker Award, announced today the editorial group.

The edition of “The End of Everything”, in the newly created Asteroid chancellor, is announced for 2027, with no specific date, and marks the British author’s debut in the Portuguese book market.

“The End of Everything” was announced as a Booker 2026 winner last Monday in London to the first 81-year-old author’s nomination for the award.

With a six-decade literary career, M. John Harrison has in “The End of Everything” a post-apocalyptic book that the Booker jury defined as a “stabilizing and satirical dystopia” that follows a man who is dedicated to searching for valuables on the beach, together with his armed aunt, “as [both] try to survive on the coast of Kent [in the south of the United Kingdom] in the near future.”.

The president of the jury, historian Mary Beard, said, quoted in a statement, that “The End of Everything” portrays “the policy of now through the lens of the future”, with a book “that turns you inside out, raises a slight smile – and, surprisingly, given the issue in question, leaves you with a little optimism.”.

For the editor of the Infinite Private Group, João Gonçalves, quoted in today’s statement, “Booker’s assignment to a science fiction author is a historic moment, and makes every sense that he arrives in Portugal by the Asteroid,” he said, recalling that “M. John Harrison has been an international reference for decades.”.

The Asteroid chancellor was launched in October this year with the edition of “Leviathan Wakes”, by James A. Corey, the name of the duo of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and is “dedicated to speculative fiction”, gathering “genres such as science fiction, fantasy, dystopia and terror”, because “the books that imagine other worlds are of those that best explain ours.” So, according to the editorial group, Harrison's work has its place here.

In an interview with the BBC, Harrison explained that the initial inspiration for “The End of Everything” was the financial crisis of 2008, and then decided to write a novel about “the failure of explanation in society.”.

According to the Portuguese publisher, “Harrison explains that the novel is part of a central issue: what happens when all our expectations and explanations about the world become a continuous disaster, but we still have to continue to live?”

“ With a unique combination of science fiction, satire and reflection on today, the writer “builds a disturbing adventure about a collapsed world and about the human ability to continue to find ways to live when all certainties seem to disappear,” the Portuguese group describes.

The 198-page book, in the English edition, focuses on “Phillip Tennent, who makes a living collecting objects brought by the tides of the English Channel”. According to the synopsis of the work, Tennent, “years after a crisis radically transformed reality”, lives in a world that seems unrecognizable: “Governments can barely function, the seas are populated by new creatures and Europe seems to have disappeared”, with everything pointing to “the end of an era”, although “the exact nature of the catastrophe remains a mystery.”.

For the Infinite Group, “The End of Everything” is a “post-apocalyptic narrative”, “disquieting and subtly satirical, which challenges the limits of human understanding and questions how we build our idea of the world”.