M. John Harrison – författare

The cult classic novel from the author of Climbers and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise AgainWith an introduction by bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield'A more grown-up version of The Secret History' LUCY SCHOLES'A groundbreaking work' GUARDIAN 'The best literary fiction out now' DAILY MAIL 'Gloriously intelligent and beautifully written' INDEPENDENT On a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Decades later, none of the participants can remember what transpired; but their clouded memories bind them together. Unable to move on, Pam Stuyvesant has epilepsy and is plagued by sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him, and invents histories to soothe Pam's fears. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The narrator is seemingly the least effected participant in the ritual: he is haunted by the smell of roses, and his guilt as he attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Strange, dreamlike and moving, The Course of the Heart is an examination of the edges of humanity where we lie, hide, hurt and heal.'A spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint that impresses and fulfils' IAIN BANKS

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020**A New Statesman Book of the Year*'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman'An extraordinary experience' William GibsonWinner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical...Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream:An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another - perhaps it's a cat, perhaps it's something that only looks like one - then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak...EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.

"An awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist" - INDEPENDENT"Amazing achievement ... Harrison pulls off the almost impossible feat of seamlessly blending hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, noir crime ... while doing what all the best literature does" - Goodreads ReviewerSet in the unique world, first featured in the award-winning Light, here is a story of love, murder, and intergalactic noir on the razors edge of the imagination, as envisioned by the incomparable M. John Harrison.In a neighbourhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event - a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts.Vic Serotonin is a travel agent, arranging illegal travel to and from Saudade. His latest client wants a tour and she is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself, and maybe just as dangerous. Coincidentally, a troubling new class of semi-biological artefacts start finding their way out of the site, transforming the real world in unsettling ways. Pursued by a detective intent on collaring him for his illegal tours, and hunted by a gangster convinced that the travel agent has infected him with a rogue artefact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos

"An awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist" - INDEPENDENT"Amazing achievement ... Harrison pulls off the almost impossible feat of seamlessly blending hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, noir crime ... while doing what all the best literature does" - Goodreads ReviewerSet in the unique world, first featured in the award-winning Light, here is a story of love, murder, and intergalactic noir on the razors edge of the imagination, as envisioned by the incomparable M. John Harrison.In a neighbourhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event - a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts.Vic Serotonin is a travel agent, arranging illegal travel to and from Saudade. His latest client wants a tour and she is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself, and maybe just as dangerous. Coincidentally, a troubling new class of semi-biological artefacts start finding their way out of the site, transforming the real world in unsettling ways. Pursued by a detective intent on collaring him for his illegal tours, and hunted by a gangster convinced that the travel agent has infected him with a rogue artefact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos

Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books of the 21st century.On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice covered with strange symbols, and a human skeleton. What they are and what they mean are the mysteries explored and unwrapped in LIGHT, M. John Harrison's triumphant novel.

'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf' Olivia Laing'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today' Robert Macfarlane'Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' Benjamin MyersRetreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a group of climbers - a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags, Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement - that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he begins to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession - at a cost.With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane

'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.

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, GRANTA AND TLS'This dazzling anti-memoir is nothing less than a portrait of a writer with a beautiful mind. Harrison turns over what it takes to simultaneously be present to everyday life and imaginative flight. A masterpiece' Deborah Levy, Books of the Year 2023, Observer'Is M John Harrison the best writer at work today? He's certainly among the deftest and most original, producing immaculately odd sentences in any genre he chooses' Olivia Laing, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian'Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison is a revival of the writer's memoir ... slippery and fascinating as any of his fiction' Jonathan Coe, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian'Unusual and impressive, Wish I Was Here is also a writing manual of brilliance' Sunday TimesM. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him?This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.'Are these notebooks, or 'nowtbooks', records of failed presence? How do they shine light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of the young artist in countercultural London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of the books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate you and delight you. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.

'Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk'It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed' Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters' ClubM. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit.This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Many of our most prominent younger writers now recognise him as the most significant British writer of his generation. He is 'brilliantly unsettling' (Olivia Laing), 'magnificent' (Neil Gaiman), 'one of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English' (Robert Macfarlane).

In Viriconium, the young men whistle to one another all night long as they go about their deadly games. If you wake suddenly, you might hear footsteps running, or an urgent sigh. After a minute or two, the whistles move away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. The next day, some lordling is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut. Who can tell fantasy from reality, magic from illusion, hero from villain, man from monster ... in Viriconium?Published here for the first time in one volume, and in the author's preferred order, are all the Viriconium stories, originally published in four books: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights.

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war.M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.