<p>By Megan Hunter</p>

Rating: 3.5/5

<p>This short novella (160 pages) is poetic prose about the end of the world as we know it. Told from the perspective of a woman who gives birth as England is submerged in floods and people are fleeing to survive. She takes her little family on a journey from shelter to shelter, displaced by the tragedy. This book is about facing the unknown through the lens of motherhood, which may be the first dystopian novel(la) I've read that does so. </p>

<b>What I liked:</b>
-The poetic prose. It is mostly empty pages and figurative language. It reads like journal entries of the deepest most private thoughts. It allows for a frankness and raw emotion that is sometimes difficult to portray in prose.
-The story of new motherhood and how it can be distilled to the most basic of needs: food, sleep, shelter. How people will do anything to just survive and babies will learn and grow even when everything else seems to regress. Motherhood is terrifying in the best of times.
-Death isn't avoided but it's also approached from a side angle. The narrator has to deal with the consequences of death all around her but doesn't come face to face with it.
<What I didn't like:</b>
-I feel like I wasn't completely satisfied at the end. I want to know more about what happened and how it happened and why it happened. But I guess, like in real life, we don't always get the clean explanation and conclusion we want.

<p><br />
Publisher: Picado<br />
Publication date: May 18, 2017<br />
Date read: July 1, 2017</p>

Review on my blog : The One with the London Moses

Another day, another apocalypse. In Megan Hunter's The End We Start From, England has been hit with some unspecified catastrophe that involves rising flood waters. People are evacuated, the military comes out, borders and checkpoints are established. In amongst all of this, the narrator has her first child, Z and the story follows Z’s first few years of life in post-disaster Britain.

Megan Hunter’s prose is spare to the point of almost being poetry. Short sentences in short paragraphs, interspersed with quotes. This gives a point of difference to a story that has now been told a few too many times. All of the clichés are there – the refugee camps, nasty roadside border guards, saviours with a boat, a short time of salvation on a remote island – but in a poetic form that makes it, to some extent feel new again.

The focus of the book is Z’s first few years of life. While growing up in the middle of a crisis, the narrator’s relationship with her son and her observations might well have just been happening in any day care centre. Z smiles, Z learns how to eat solids, Z pulls himself to his feet, Z learns how to walk. Given the lack of any real threat most of the time, the vague post-apocalyptic setting and styling do not make these achievements particularly interesting.

The End We Start From feels like an interesting experiment in a sub-genre that seems to be exploding. This is a simple tale with no great pandemic or war or zombies or killer robots. And much like the Lily Brooks-Dalton's recent Good Morning, Midnight, it is quiet and contemplative, any violence or action happening well off-screen. Just a woman and her newborn son, surviving in a world that has become inhospitable. A poetic post-apocalypse.

These days, a dystopian novel has to really do something different and exciting to grab my attention--this trend seems nearly played out, and I didn't feel this book really had anything new to offer the genre.

Short, interesting but not for me. That is the easiest way for me to describe this book. Told in first person, The End We Start From is a journey with a woman who has just had her baby as London begins to flood. With her husband she escapes to her in laws who live in the mountain. From there it’s a story of survival and motherhood. I wanted more. Hunter’s writing style is vague and lacking in detail. While that style helped keep the focus on her and her child, it wasn’t enough for me to become invested in the story. The world building wasn’t concise or fleshed out, instead I was left imagining exactly how dire the situation was based on the lack on information provided: a tent, a bed, a bench. The plot moved but the only motivating factor was the aging of the child with the passing of time. I’m not sure what I learned about the mother as a person because her only focus was the baby with few flashbacks into the world before the flood. The lack of detail, world building and character development kept me from truly enjoying this dystopian tale. It is a quick read but not one I can readily recommend.

A perfect end-of-the-world story with less of the end and more of the world.
Megan Hunter shows us a believable end of the world, the waters have risen and people are fleeing. Z's just had her first child and she would do anything to protect him, to her the end of the world does not matter as long as she has her son. Hunter presents us with a different idea of the end of the world, she chooses to focus of the importance of human relationships and the goodness of people, putting a larger faith in the world. Her writing is poetic and beautiful and captures perfectly the goodness of a world in a bad situation.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free eBook copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a lot shorter than I thought it was going to be, so I actually ended up sitting down and reading it in an evening. The End We Start From has some really beautiful, and almost lyrical prose. I wasn’t expecting an apocalyptic book to be written like this, and right away it hooked me on the book.

The characters in this book were all named with just initials, which was interesting. Though I felt it made the characters feel a little distant. I never really felt for them as much as I wanted too, and as much as I thought the story had potential to make me feel. But I did like the idea of seeing the end of the world from the point of view of a mother. In the end I decided to give this book 3.5 stars.

Congratulations to Megan Hunter for a well-written first novel. A young woman gives birth to a son as London is submerged by floodwaters and everyone flees. She, her partner, and her son flee north into a dangerous territory to save themselves. The story is centered on the woman bonding with her son under extraordinary conditions. Set in the future, the book ultimately demonstrates renewal and rebirth. The story has much tragedy, yet it didn't evoke emotion from me - I couldn't seem to care about the characters and their situation. I would have liked to see more character development and more detail in the story; however, I can appreciate the abstractness of the human situation under difficult circumstances.

Thanks to Megan Hunter and Grove Atlantic through Netgalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am at a serious loss how to review this book. The blurb on the back of this book told me it was an interesting read. Then I read a review that gave the opposite of what I expected. So me being me I just had to read it. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, I wouldn't say it was what I expected. The book left me feeling empty and with a what the hell have I just read feeling.

I will admit it is quite well written. The book is about a young women giving birth for the first time while London is being swallowed by water. Then you get the journey of mother and child escaping the flood waters going from refugee camp to refugee camp. Finally arriving back home and being reunited with the husband/father. Sounds good right?

The book basically describes the babies first year in the world and how he relates to the world ending on his ability to take his first steps. The story left me feeling disjointed and now I've finished I am still waiting for something. I just don't know what.

I think finishing this book was an achievement but I am also pleased I did finish it. Again I can't explain why. Have a go I did. Enjoy!


*ARC provided by publisher via NetGalley*


https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2036289208


https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1KD50JQETX6J6/ref=pe_1572281_66412651_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

The End We Start from is the story of a mother struggling to survive when a natural disaster of a catastrophic level occurs shortly after the birth of her first child.

The premise of this novel was interesting, but I felt it was hard to follow at times, and overall the writing style did not work for me. With the characters only identified by letters, it was hard to keep track of who was who, other than the main character's son (Z) and husband (R).

Overall, The End We Start From is a tale of what could happen, and how relationships and families would be built and tested, should a flood of biblical proportions occur. The writing style, while confusing, is definitely unique, and will likely be what makes this book a hit or miss for readers.

Grove Atlantic
Publishing date November 17, 2017

Synopsis:

As London is submerged below flood waters, 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, shelter to shelter, to a desolate island and back again. The story traces fear and wonder, as the baby’s small fists grasp at the first colors he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.

My thoughts;

Highly praised by literary critics, a movie in the making, THE END WE START FROM by Megan Hunter a success before it's release to the public.
Some have qualified the novel as a sci-fi others a literary novel.

Nowhere did I feel I was reading a sci-fi novel. It is centered around three people, a mother, a baby, a husband in London. Yes there is a flood and all that follows a natural disaster of great proportion.

I like to mention the beautiful poetic narrative. A real pleasure to read. My hope is for Megan Hunter to continue writing. This is her first novel, a mere 140 pages.

I highly recommend this novel.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this advance copy.

This is special.

The writing is crisp , it has a hypnotic feeling. The writing propels the reader and i read it in one sitting.

The dystopian setting sits well with the main narrative and the characters feel real .

The ending is perfect and the last paragraph will live with the reader.

Recommended without reservation

I'm going to write a very short review, for a very short book. My biggest difficulty is to define Megan Hunter's writing: is it poetry or prose? The narrative just flows, no temporal or spatial constraints present, like an ebb... Then, the nameless characters are quite hard to remember.
Nevertheless, if you ask yourself what you'd do if you were there, trying to survive for your new-born son's sake, roaming from one camp to another, being abandoned by spouse and friends... you'd do probably the same. You'd abandon everything, you'd keep track of time by registering your son's first smile, first laugh, first tumble, you'd try to go back to the emty shell of your house and your marriage. In the end relationships make us humans, not our possessions or modern commodities.
Interesting and thought-provoking in a nutshell.

Wow! This book really got me! The writing style of Hunter is really interesting. I liked her unusual way of allowing the reader to pretty much arrive at their own understanding of events in this novel as they unfolded.

With the current refugee issues worldwide at the moment and people being uprooted from their homes due to war, etc, I believe this book highlights the fear, sadness, uncertainty and survival of these people. Although this book is actually written about a young couple who have just had a baby and their survival through a natural disaster, there are so many parallels to any survival situation, I believe it will resinate with many people.

This book is a quick read, as it is not a long book. I did feel that the end was kind of rushed just a little and that there could have been a bit more detail given to the situation on their return. I don't want to write any spoilers in this review, so I'll leave it at that, but overall, well worth the read.

Thank you Netgalley for the copy. Very talented author!

slogged through it, but it was a challenge. I didn't enjoy the narrative or the use of letters only for names. the main character just didn't seem to care about anything, not even fighting for survival for her son.

"These are the remains of a life, it seems. The unsavoured, the savoured. Days are thin now, stretched so much that time pours through them."

Haunting, elusive and totally beguiling. Don't go into this expecting a novel. The experience of reading it is more akin to poetry. It only takes an hour or two to read, but its afterimage remains for much longer.

This was a short novel, a cautionary tale on the condition of earth should the water rise and take over the land. Not only would we lose the land, we would also lose ourselves to drift in a world where we moved from place to place looking for a place where we can be dry.

Into the environment comes a family, a new mother and her husband. The novella is not really so much directed towards disaster as it is a treatise on being a parent. The husband is missing in this story, where all people go by an initial and have no name. The mother needs to keep going, and as she does she bears witness to the cycle of her baby's life. She calls him Z and her life and his go through various places and stages as time and life cycles do. She loves him, he depends on her. She feeds his body, he feed her soul. She provides him warmth and he provides her solace.

This was a strange tale, one that said more to motherhood than to any disaster facing this planet. Set in England, an island nation, it pointed to the fact that no matter how much things change, a mother will always take care of her child and see to his/her survival the best and only way she knows how.

Read through the courtesy of NetGalley and Grove Atlantic, Grove Press

Unfortunately this book was a miss for me. I enjoyed that it was a short story, but the lack of dialogue and character development really threw me. Some people will enjoy that the relative anonymity makes the story relatable as if it could happen to anyone, but I really enjoy meeting characters and immersing myself in their lives by getting to know them better. That helps me care about their stories and want to continue reading. I skimmed through this book because I did not feel a connection to anyone.

What a wonderful book! The prose is very spare but the author manages to tell a profound story of love, loss, friendship and possible redemption. A celebration of enjoying the small things in life - a baby's smile, a sunrise - set against the enormity of a catastrophic event.
At first I was unsure about the use of initials for people's names but gradually came to appreciate it as it gave the whole story a very universal feel.

I haven't read such an original epic tale of poetic prose, ever. Beautifully described, almost a direct stream of consciousness from the main narrator who is a pregnant woman, over 35. She deals with an apocalyptic disaster in a real and visceral way that I can only liken to John Wyndham or Joe Hill in it's raw reality. I was with her every step of the way, but swept along, not dragged and tortured.
The narrative could almost be sung, the prose morph into musical lyrics.
Combing the story with intersections of biblical verse, mythology and legend was genius.
A very special book.