Settling the World

From the winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize...

Throughout his career, M. John Harrison's writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else.

This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with 'the other' in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison's rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.

Foreword by Jennifer Hodgson.

'All [stories] are elegant and inventive... Harrison writes memorably about people who are bewildered, sidetracked, trapped or on the lookout for opportunities to change.' - The Spectator

'Harrison excels at evoking the deadened absurdity of the everyday.' - The TLS

'Settled... certainly doesn't mean being tucked up. Rather, again and again these works are about the settling of scores.' - The Scotsman

'The evolution of Harrison's prose can be traced across the stories, the steely, mannered prose typical of the British New Wave giving way to the warmer, more supple sentences that mark his late style.' - The Quietus

'A brilliant labyrinth of tales by one of modern fiction's most distinctive voices.' - Locus Magazine

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