This was a very unusual book and it left me unsettled. By just using letters for names, I never felt that I could connect to any of the characters, which left me cold. As the story went on, in spite of the horrific conditions the characters faced, I just didn't care enough because I didn't have that connection. Fortunately, the book was short, so I was able to finish before I was completely turned off. Ironically, I thought this was a great idea for a novel, just thought it just needed to be fleshed out quite a bit.

Synopsis

The End We Start From is set in a dystopian universe in which London has experienced an environmental disaster that has forced its’ inhabitants out of their homes and into the North where refugee camps have become one of the only ways one can survive. Our unnamed main character has just given birth to her first child, Z, at the start of this novel – at the brink of London’s mysterious disaster. You follow her as she travels with her newborn child from shelter to shelter, discovering motherhood, even through life’s unexpected toils. As they move from place to place, Z learns to grasp life, seemingly content against all odds. This is a story of a mother: a woman desperately clinging to the hope of new life in a terrifying world


Thoughts // Review

"The window is completely black, the darkness total. We are the only people here. The truth: we’ve always felt like this."

I am finally dipping my toes into some more experimental literature, and I’m happy I decided to read this one. Being only 150 or so pages, and written in a very broken up prose format, it was a quick read, and perfect for a rookie of experimental fiction.

On top of that, it truly was gorgeously written. It was beautifully sparse (and also frustratingly so). The stylization of the writing was brilliant, and in parts almost felt like poetry. The sparseness of the prose reflected well on our protagonist, as her world shrinks around her, minimizing her ability to see past her essentials: her child and their need to stay alive.

The characters in this novel are all called by only their first initial, making a novel that could be very personal, seem more universal, which I thought was very poignant and thoughtful on the author’s part.

The plot is really irrelevant, as you follow this mother from place to place, finding people, losing them, and meeting new survivors. This is not a novel to read if you are looking for an action packed dystopian, with loads of adventure. This book is truly a meditation on motherhood, loss, and finding new beginnings amongst disaster and chaos.

"I can see every star in the sky. They look straight through us, a sparkling indifference."


My Rating: 4/5 Stars

Naturally this will be compared with Max Porter upon it's inevitable high profile paperback release, but really it's much closer to the work Sarah Crossan has been putting out. Yes, it's poetic prose but it runs in a very straight forward linear narrative making it both extremely accessible and highly commercial. The use of The Great Flood works very well and is thoroughly explored. I liked the hopeful ending and the avoidance of the Global Warming trap. The verse flows smoothly and each word serves the plot, the care taken is evident. The story is feminist, an independent woman struggling to support herself and her child, but the message isn't too heavy.

I read this is one sitting. It's a short novel, with sparse, haunting prose. It's a interesting, unique take on apocalyptic fiction that I really enjoyed. It leaves a lot to the imagination, so if you need things to be spelled out, you might want to skip it. Otherwise, I definitely recommend it.

While there are many passages that caught my breath in this short novel, I found myself left wanting at the end. The lack of names for anyone in the entire book makes it hard to connect with characters. I found the plot intriguing, but wished it a hundred pages longer with far more detail and substance. A new mother myself, the descriptions of Z growing and learning parallel my current journey and those moments were beautiful.

This took a little while for me to get into but once I got going I did enjoy the story. I would still recommend this book to others

Beautifully and frustratingly sparse. This book is written in absolutely stunning prose that in places feels like poetry. It is stylistically wonderful - its sparseness works great in conveying the way the world has shrunk around the protagonist; minimizing her field of vision around the essentials: her new-born son and her husband.

Set in the not so distant future when the oceans have risen dramatically and drowned much of England, the main character has just given birth to her son when she has to leave London to go North. We follow her from place to place, meeting people, losing people, finding people. The plot is near irrelevant though: it is more a meditation on motherhood, on beginnings and endings, on love and loss. All the characters are only referred to by their initials, leaving the reader at a distance and rendering this very personal tale universal.

I adored the way this book was told; I enjoyed the juxtaposition of motherhood and the end-times and I found many sentences beautiful beyond words. It was a highly satisfying reading experience - however, I am not sure how much of it will stick with me. The book is too short and sparse to really tell a story and the language while stunning does not help the feeling of detachment. The book is full with metaphors and foreshadowing and mixes the personal and the universal in a highly stylized matter. But sometimes I like books told in style and glitter and beautiful sentences. Here I did.

First sentence: "I am hours from giving birth, from the event I thought would never happen to me, and R has gone up a mountain."
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I received an arc of this book curtesy of NetGalley and Grove Atlantic in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for that!

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. So... here goes. Wow. I am not entirely sure how I feel. This reads like a grey, intimate and introspective, poem. We are not told what has happened with the world, we only get glimpses of a dystopian reality from the thoughts of a new mother. Those thoughts are both raw and numb, a passive sadness and loss that is magnificently expressed through her child, Z. Z is born during the disaster, meaning that he never will know the world as it used to be. For him, this nightmarish earth is home. As such, him and his generation will grow up and move on, resilient, unfeeling, adapting. There is hope as well as tragedy in that.
I liked the no names thing. It makes our protagonists universal and it contributes to the general athmosphere.

I feel like this is a type of book you either love or… just don’t get (like me). I saw so many comments and reviews of people saying that they enjoyed this short story so much, that it was emotional and terrifying, and all other good adjectives that you can apply to a novel.

For me it was… weird. Don’t panic yet! Weird does not mean bad! Here is an accurate definition before you all lash out at me: «Strikingly odd or unusual»

You might be wondering: what was so weird about it?

Well, let me tell you (I will try not to spoil anything but considering the length of this book I won’t be able to say a lot)

1 - The first weird thing was the Names. The characters were called by one letter - O, N, R, Z and so on. I actually wonder now if the whole alphabet was there… hm..
2 - The scenes were so short and cut abruptly that it felt like an outline for a bigger novel (especially considering the letters for the names).
3 - There was too much pregnancy / birth / baby things going on and I was not a fan!

Interesting premise and some lovely turns of phrase, but overall I found this story of surviving disastrous conditions somewhat lacking in actual story.

This was one of the most beautifully written books I've ever had the pleasure to read. A beautiful story of motherhood, and navigating the world with the responsibility of a new born on your hands. It takes these themes to a whole other degree with the overarching plot line being the unstable environment collapsing around our main characters and changing their lives drastically. Our main character's thoughts were so fascinating! I feel like this is a novel I can read over and over and over again and always get something new out of. The writing style was just so interesting! I want to dissect it and study it and learn it by heart. I need my own copy once it is released in November. I am going to be studying this thing like it's my job. Hopefully, I'll have a review up soon on my blog (which is a rare occasion)

I was intrigued to read The End We Start From once I saw the cover and read the blurb but my excitement peaked there. Although it was a short read, it was difficult to follow. There were a lot of blanks left in the plot line that kept you guessing what might have actually happened. In my opinion, the fact the every character had a one-letter name made it even harder to follow.

Me 96% of the time while reading the book: "Is K this person? Or is it F? Or wait...is that N?"

I had expected a dystopia that toys with current ongoing worries about climate change and global warming. In that regard it didn't let me down and gave me this unruly feeling most dystopias manage to cause. Maybe this even more as it puts its finger right on the pulse of the time.
However, it offers so much more than that. With few words, rough paint strokes, Megan Hunter creates her pictures, this oppressive atmosphere of a grey bleakness as well as moments of panic and depression. But underlying it all is this sense of - and I can't find a different word that would sound less corny - hope. It is all in the description of Z's developments. Time passes and despite what the state of the world is, the child grows and goes through those stages we all had to go through - teething, crawling, learning to stand up.

It reminded me of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.
It is less a novel and more a kind-of poem. A lot is cut out and left entirely to the imagination of the reader. I admit that I got confused more than once at the sudden "jumps" in narration but it all fell back into place upon reading on.
The writing is fantastic and fits perfectly the story Megan Hunter tells. I'm in absolute awe and glad I found this gem.
The only thing that caused some frowning on my part were the (I think?) quotes. I would have loved a bibliography what had been taken from where unless it was all from the Bible. In that case, ignore me... I'm no expert but I think I recognised more than one religion in those quotes/references hence why I would have liked to be able to check what the sources were without having to google it all myself. (I'm lazy... I admit that too.)

I love a good dystopian story just as much as the next person, but this was hard to get into. The first half felt more like ramblings than anything else, and I think setting up the story could've been tighter. On the other hand, it was disjointed, which is pretty akin to what we would actually experience should of entire existence be uprooted from a natural disaster. Unfortunately, it was still hard to follow along.

Once you get about 50% in, the writing begins to flow and settle down so to speak. The random poetry throughout sometimes works, and sometimes it's awkward. This second half shifts more pointedly towards the theme of motherhood and survival. Or put differently, the survival of motherhood.

This was a solid 2 stars, until the second half where the story got better.

*Thanks to Netgalley and Publisher for ARC in exchange for honest review.*

Thank you for the opportunity to review this novella. I enjoyed it, generally, though it didn't really touch on any new ground. (That's a challenging goal now, of course, with the genre so saturated)
For those interested, I'll recommend it.

Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From presents a drowned version of a post-apocalyptic London where its inhabitants are forced on a mass exodus from the capital as living conditions become more treacherous and flood waters rise. As a post-apocalyptic novel, it’s more concerned about one mother’s love for her new born child, and raising him during this exodus, rather than the actual dystopian world they find themselves in – unfortunately, as a childless twentysomething, I can’t say this novel particularly spoke to me in quite the same way as it seems to have done so for many other readers.

In concept, Megan Hunter’s debut is chilling – it presents a vision of a post-apocalyptic London which has been hit by flood waters, and is slowly forcing Londoners to leave their homes behind and head north in order to try to escape the flood. It’s a story of exodus set against the story of birth amidst destruction, figuratively and literally, because the main character must survive this apocalypse with a newborn baby in tow. Readers see the baby’s growth over the days, weeks, and months, and the special maternal bond which exists and is not altered at all by the reality of the horrible apocalypse which surrounds this mother and child. Interludes of various creation stories interject amidst the main domestic narrative of a new mother and child provide the obvious link between Hunter’s narrative and Biblical themes of birth, destruction, and rebirth.

However, for all its interesting concept, I found the pacing and style to be much too forced for my liking. There was something artistic and abstract and purposeful about it that rubbed me up the wrong way. The writing was undoubtedly accomplished, and I can see that Megan Hunter has a background not only in English literature but specifically in writing poetry. I can well believe that, because this read a tad like an extended narrative poem, written in free verse, and it is a style of poetry that I just don’t “get” the same way that other readers do – it’s just not to my personal taste, so once I realised this novel was in that vein, I’m afraid it was an insurmountable issue for me.

Comparisons can be, I think, fairly drawn between The End We Start From and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – both novels feature a parent and child dynamic and story of survival amidst a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape. Like The Road, in The End We Start From we are never permitted to learn the full names of the characters, nor are they described with particular attention or detail – a lot of the work must be done by the reader’s own imagination. The writing style is sparse in both but, for my money, I didn’t quite get along with this in Megan Hunter’s debut – I didn’t understand the claims of lyricism and profundity that a lot of reviewers and readers praised in this novel, to me it was just too abstracted and fragmentary, it didn’t feel like a sustained or particularly nuanced novel. It felt more like the vague impression or draft of a novel, rather than a finished product. For me, it just didn’t have enough pages in order to for a reader to really connect with the characters and to go somewhere. I didn’t feel anything for the mother and child, perhaps due to my own lack of life experience that prevented this story from really hitting home for me. Really, the sparse style just wasn’t my cup of tea.

In summary, this book is beautifully produced, and the overriding concept of (re)birth after destruction is an intriguing idea, it’s just a shame that for me, ultimately, the execution of the idea fell vastly short of all its hype.

I LOVE apocalyptic fiction and this does NOT disappoint! For some reason it reminds me of A Discovery of Witches, tho the storylines are nowhere near the same of course, the style feels similar. Just an engrossing read!

A beautifully written novel, haunting in every way, a unique take on the end of the world told through the special bond of mother and child... but is this really a novel or a novella? One has to wonder why it was so short, almost as if you read an advanced outline rather than the full thing. If the one critique you get is that you wish there was more, then you're doing something right... but perhaps this took that concept a bit too far. Could've been a great, but in my eyes it fell short. 4 out of 5.

Gorgeous cover and prose that showcases how elegant the English language can be in its simplest forms. Still, a bit sparse for my tastes.