The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison (Riverhead). In this accomplished work, both dreamlike and incisive, strange beings of an unknown nature have colonized Earth. Years after their arrival, an elderly woman with dementia, who lives in a house near a crashed Airbus A330, and her beachcomber nephew, embark on a kind of quest with no grail. The novel brings them, by turns, to a space-telecommunications facility, an abandoned museum, and other locales half prosaic, half bizarre.