Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Observer (London), Granata, and TLS, and a finalist for a World Fantasy Award.

Acclaimed master of speculative fiction, fantasy, space opera, and literary realism and one of the most celebrated living British authors M. John Harrison has crafted a “masterpiece” (Helen MacDonald, author of H Is for Hawk) with this anti-memoir about the joys and perils of the writing life.

M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author. 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 prose, this “infectiously engaging” (The Times Literary Supplement, London) 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