British author M. John Harrison's The End of Everything has won this year's Booker Prize. For his win, Harrison won £50,000. At 81, he is the oldest author to win in the history of the Booker Prize.

This win was surprised me. If I was a betting man I would have put it all on Marlon James' latest novel, The Disappearers. For those of you interested in what sort of story could have pulled off such an upset, here's The End of Everything's jacket copy:

Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artifacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been mislaid. It feels like the end.

Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artifact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding, from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.

This year's five-member panel was chaired by Mary Beard and included Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu, and Patricia Lockwood.