The End of Everything by M John Harrison, which has won this year’s Booker Prize, is an apocalyptic etching. A modern Britain has been made unrecognisable by strange spectral presences that have drifted into the island and rendered large stretches uninhabitable. The presences are called the “iGhetti”, though no one knows why, and the hostile zones are called “bad patches”, though no one knows the reason for that either.