{"id":608733,"date":"2026-09-23T01:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T01:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/608733\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T01:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T01:56:12","slug":"offbeat-titles-shake-up-the-2026-booker-prize-shortlist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/608733\/","title":{"rendered":"Offbeat titles shake up the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Probably the most interesting is M. John Harrison&#8217;s The End of Everything, a work of\u00a0speculative fiction, that broad genre of fantasy, sci-fi and more. While there have been notable Booker nods to speculative fiction it is not common.\u00a0Harrison has been an admired writer for years.\u00a0The\u00a0novel\u00a0throws the reader into a post-apocalyptic England where aliens have arrived, and society is breaking down but, in the midst of it, no-one is sure what is going on. It contains\u00a0some very funny scenes amidst the bleakness. At one\u00a0point, the tough elderly woman accompanying\u00a0an alien tells it off for not paying for clothes at a secondhand shop. In another, she and the alien sort a deck of cards but cannot understand how\u00a0the other\u00a0has arrived at their sorting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Probably the most interesting is M. John Harrison&#8217;s The End of Everything, a work of\u00a0speculative fiction, that broad&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-608733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}