Wish I Was Here (eBook)

I love this book, even if I don't know how to describe it. Is it a memoir? Is it a handbook for writers? As always with M John Harrison, you're never quite sure what you're reading or where it will take you next. There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed

Infectiously engaging, packed with rueful wisdom and a distinctive sense of mischief

A deep dive into the back-and-forth, up-down, sideways mind of a true genius. An immersive pleasure and a literary adventure

He is one of the very great writers alive today

This is one of the most original books about writing that I have read, in part because Harrison is as profound about the art as he is helpful on the craft ... destabilising, witty, exhilarating - an important contribution to the genre's evolution

A stand-out playful reframing of the memoir form

One of the best writers currently at work in English

'Harrison is the shape-shifting master of absent and elusive things, many of them absent and eluding in Barnes and the Peak District. In this mesmerising book, the author - or rather his style - goes in search of what may have been his memories of different versions of his life. The result is an enchantment of instability, usually ungraspable, always intense.'

An extraordinary writer and an extraordinary book. I don't know how to describe it, which is to say that I'll read it again, and again

It's extraordinary. Profound, hilarious, precise, vagrant and speculative. And always intensely good company. The sort of book that makes writing seem possible again. (Or is it impossible?)

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

Read it. You will want to press it on others like a mildly deranged Ancient Mariner haranguing those poor wedding guests as they try to go about their business

Delightfully oddball and original

Hilarious and haunting

Harrison captures the stultifying and and generative landscape of post-industrial England better than anyone else

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