Wish I Was Here: 'The best writer you've never heard of' - Sunday Times

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'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' Club

M. 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).

Reviews

'Infectiously engaging, packed with rueful wisdom and a distinctive sense of mischief' - Keith Miller

'One of the best writers currently at work in English' - Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places

'Hilarious and haunting' - William Gibson, author of Neuromancer

''Harrison is the shape-shifting master of absent and elusive things, many of them absent and eluding in Barnes and the Peak District. In this mesmerising book, the author - or rather his style - goes in search of what may have been his memories of different versions of his life. The result is an enchantment of instability, usually ungraspable, always intense.'' - Neil MacGregor, author of Living with the Gods

'A deep dive into the back-and-forth, up-down, sideways mind of a true genius. An immersive pleasure and a literary adventure' - Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

Author Bio

M. John Harrison, a genre-defying author and literary critic, has been hailed by writers including Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane and Neil Gaiman as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today.