Wish I Was Here

By: M. John Harrison

Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE GUARDIAN, THE OBSERVER (LONDON), GRANTA, AND TLS

One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation in this “anti-memoir.”

M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him?

This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: “A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.”

Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?

With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.

“Wish I Was Here is a beautifully strange masterwork. It is as if M. John Harrison’s prose devises its own autobiography, while the figure of its author stands to one side tinkering at a eulogy for a dead cat, a manifesto against ruin porn, and a manual of operating procedures for creativity as funky as a Brian Eno card deck. How can this also produce a sublime fugue on memory and aging? Read it and see.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

©2024 M. John Harrison (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

Critic reviews

"Infectiously engaging, packed with rueful wisdom and a distinctive sense of mischief."—Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year 2023

"M. John Harrison's 'anti-memoir' is a masterpiece. Broad in scope and beautifully written, this unconventional autobiography contains some of the best advice struggling writers will ever receive."—Nicolas Lezard, The Spectator

"This book is old school experiment, several unrelated episodes from a literary reality show, a kind of negative biography with a big author-shaped hole in the middle waiting for the reader to fill based on all the evidence around it. It's also one of the best books I've read so far this year."—International Times