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Summary
Summary
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JODIE COMER
"Engrossing, compelling." -- Naomi Alderman, author of The Power
"I was moved, terrified, uplifted - sometimes all three at once." -- Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
Publishing in the US to a wave of critical acclaim and nominations for two major literary prizes, Megan Hunter's internationally bestselling, extraordinarily poetic debut novel imagines new motherhood in the midst of an all-too-possible climate change catastrophe. A startlingly beautiful story of a family's survival, The End We Start From is a searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that's familiar.
As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. Their journey traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.
The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book--a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change.
Author Notes
Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story "Selfing." The End We Start From is her first book.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The postapocalyptic literary novel is currently in vogue almost to the point of redundancy, but Hunter's slim yet sharp debut offers a level of precision and interiority rarely seen in the genre. The novel opens with an unnamed narrator giving birth to her first child, known only as Z, just as a mysterious and devastating flood overtakes London. But rather than focus on the specifics of the catastrophe, the story instead becomes an investigation of the tumultuous internal life of a new mother. The scaffolding of the apocalypse narrative-hiding out from potential threats while also endlessly searching for supplies, trying to establish normalcy in the face of the unknown as sacrifices and forays into dangerous territory become increasingly necessary-serve more as a backdrop to the strangeness of a new human life. The narrator forges relationships with other survivors as she moves from place to place in search of safety and community, but the journey toward recognizing the world for what it has become is made all the more poignant as she begins to see it through the eyes of Z, a child who has never known it to be anything other than what it is now. Told in a voice that is by turns meditative, desperate, and hopeful, this novel showcases Hunter's considerable talents and range. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Hunter's debut novel is the spare narration of a woman's first year with her baby, called Z a bizarre and disorienting experience made far more so by the massive flood that forces them from their home in London. The narrator, who is unnamed, and her husband, R, first seek refuge with R's parents, until tragedy pushes them further afield to a shelter that's overflowing with the many displaced others. When R leaves, to hopefully find some other solution for them, the narrator finds community in a group of mothers and their young children while she wonders if she'll ever see R again. Through the narrator's restrained, episodic, and suspenseful recounting, Hunter excels particularly in portraying both devastating calamity and the aspects of mothering that are unchanged by it. Peekaboo entertains Z to no end; when he grasps an object for the first time, it is a triumph, and when he tries to roll over, It looks like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands. Impossible. A uniquely intimate tale of motherhood amid catastrophe.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Guardian Review
This fragmentary debut novel sets the shock of new motherhood against an England hit by apocalyptic floods Having a baby can feel like the end of the world. In her slim, fragmentary debut novel, Megan Hunter examines new motherhood against an apocalyptic scenario in which flooding tips England into chaos: as the narrator's waters break, the waters in London rise. As in Emma Donoghue's Room, where the notorious Fritzl case inspired an exploration of the claustrophobia and intensity of the mother-child relationship, the extremity of the setting powers the novel's central metaphor at the same time as throwing the repetitions and revelations of parenting into sharp relief. It is also part of a growing trend to approach parenthood side on, smash it into fragments, and offer up the shards. Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation did this brilliantly in 2014, jumbling together motherhood, marriage and stifled ambition. Rivka Galchen's Little Labours, published this month, is a miscellany of new parenthood with its own arresting metaphor: to have a baby, she writes, is to welcome a puma into your apartment. If motherhood now has its own literary subgenre, the same is true of climate-change catastrophe. "How easily we have got used to it all, as though we knew what was coming all along," muses the heroine, as she is stopped at a checkpoint. Hunter sees both subjects afresh, through a sharp eye for detail that is both undeceived and faintly amused, and through the extreme spareness of her narration: the story proceeds in snatches, like a series of stepping stones across the blank expanse of an unknown future. Along with most of the words that would normally make up a novel, Hunter casts names aside. The narrator and her partner R call their baby boy Z; to escape the chaos of London, they drive north to R's parents, N and G. As the city drowns, the early pages are saturated in the breast milk that "billows from me like winter smoke in the bath". Holed up in the countryside, "Z is real, with his tiny cat skull and sweet-smelling crap. The news is rushing by. It is easy to ignore." Yet soon the breakdown of society forces them to move on, through refugee camps towards a remote Scottish island. We intuit the peril pressing in from all sides, but the narrator's vision is dominated by Z's ordinary, miraculous milestones -- first smile, first laugh, first tooth. Her journey through Z's first year of life, as well as the wider turmoil of a country in chaos, turns out to be one she must make alone: after various traumas, R melts away and she is thrown into company with other mothers, something she swore when pregnant she would avoid. There is plenty of smartly funny writing about babies here. Z's first attempts to roll over look "like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands. Impossible". Anyone who remembers taking their newborn to a baby group will smile at the narrator's horrified reaction to other infants in the refugee camp: "Her baby looks grotesquely large to me, with a huge head and completely erect body. He is eight months old." Hunter deftly sketches in the details of a very English apocalypse, too, with the weary crowds on the road "like mass hitchhiking with no lifts", in their cheerfully coloured cagoules "bought for Sunday walks. Orange, purple, turquoise. They stick out of the gloaming like flags." But there is also a lot of blank space, perhaps more than the body of the story can carry. Hunter walks a fine line, stylistically speaking, between the spare and the sketchy, the profound and the perfunctory. Italicised interludes based on various creation myths -- " The earth was bare, and barren, and no trees grew, and no flowers, and all was still ", reads one in its entirety -- are not developed or differentiated enough from the main narrative to work as symbolic counterpoint. The narrator repeatedly demonstrates the euphemistic inadequacy of language, with lists of words standing in for events elsewhere: "Here are some of R's words for what happened: tussle, squabble, slaughter." "I overhear clippings, confused whispers: incursion, interruption, increase." It's an effective way to gesture at the hinterland beyond the domestic intimacies of the main story, and a reminder of the narrator's absorption in the wordless, bodily concerns of new motherhood; but as the book progresses, it slides into shorthand. The End We Start From is an effective, unusual and ambitious debut, which keeps the reader pinned to the page: but next time I'd love to see Hunter expand on her aphorisms, and start to fill in some of the gaps. - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
A haunting take on modern disaster, this contemporary fable fuses the epic and the intimate, the semicollapse of society alongside the birth of a child.Hunter's debut begins with an unnamed narrator in labor with her first baby at an apartment in London. The crisis at hand is ominous and ill-defined: floodwaters, devastating enough to render large swaths of the city uninhabitable, force mass evacuations. Our narrator, her husband, R, and their newborn son, Z, head north. Characters are known by only their first initial, a stylistic choice that's in line with the novel's spare prose but reads like a gimmick after a while. The new family must adjust and adapt again and again as they journey ever northward, first to R's parents' house in the country, then to a series of government-sponsored refugee camps. Hunter is a poet, and the novel is slim enough to be consumed in a single sitting: short paragraphs and frequent line breaks set off the narrator's thoughts in declarative stanzas, like aphorisms: "I have read that, when someone knows they are going to die, the world becomes acutely itself." Occasional italicized passages, which are separate from but complement the main narrative, allude to the book of Genesis, namely the Creation story and the Great Flood. "A dove was sent to see if the water had left the face of the land, but she found no place for her foot." Parents, especially, will recognize the familial exchanges of domestic life, like the transfer of milk from mother to child, rendered as equally consequential to the loss of home. In this new world, the line between the mundane tasks of everyday life and the struggle to survive ceases to exist. Prescient in its depiction of climate change-induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love, Hunter's tale gains impact from its plausibility. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT London is under water. People are fleeing the city in panic. An unnamed narrator escapes with her husband and new baby to the family farm, where they survive for a brief time before supplies run out. Then, along with many others, they leave their safe surroundings for the uncertainty of life on the road, eventually ending up in a communal encampment. When the camp also becomes uninhabitable, they continue northward from one shelter to another, until the husband goes off in search of provisions and doesn't return. The wife then links up with another young mother whose husband has disappeared, allowing each of them to help the other with child care and other necessary chores. Amid the chaos, they are able to see their young children grow and flourish just as they might have done in better circumstances. Verdict The story may seem familiar-the dystopian nightmare, the mass migration, food shortages, an uncertain future-but debut novelist Hunter's spare prose and luminous writing give it a fresh immediacy. [See Prepub Alert, 5/22/17.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
* * * I am thirty-two weeks pregnant when they announce it: the water is rising faster than they thought. It is creeping faster. A calculation error. A badly plotted movie, sensors out at sea. We hide under the duvet with a torch like children. I ask R if he still would have done it. If he had known. He doesn't answer. He shines the torch up into the duvet and makes his fingers into ducks. I decide to take that as a yes. * * * I am a geriatric primigravida, but I don't look it. We have leather sofas. R spills takeaway on them and grins: wipe clean. I am thirty-eight weeks when they tell us we will have to move. That we are within the Gulp Zone. I say whoever thought of that name should be boiled in noodles. R spends all night on the same property website. It is loading very slowly. * * * Man came from a germ. From this germ we fashioned him, from clot to bones to thick flesh. We stood him up on one end, a new creation. * * * J phones an ambulance and S looks out of the window palely. I gaze at the wooden floor. I have never noticed how beautiful it is before. It is perfectly dusk-coloured, and the whorls are rising like dark little planets through its glow. Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness. Excerpted from The End We Start From by Megan Hunter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
