I received this book as an ARC, which I always appreciate. However, I had a hard time reading it because it didn't captivate me.

I found this book difficult to get into but once it got going I enjoyed it.

An interesting dystopian tale following major flooding mixed with the struggles of early motherhood. Although I found it difficult to relate to the single alphabet names, I enjoyed the story which dealt with confusion, motherhood and survival.

I had really high hopes for this book but was really disappointed.
I didn't care about any of the characters. Part of it was that she didn't name them. They only went by letters, "R," "Z,", "O,." That kept a distance between the characters and myself.
There was a catastrophic flood and the protagonist, whose name we never know, has a newborn and has to figure out how to survive, as her family leaves her one by one, either by death or abandonment.

I liked her writing style at first but after a while it got on my nerves and I couldn't wait to get to the end. Had it not been so short I probably would have just skimmed the rest of it.

Way too abstract and annoying.

I really did not like this book, if you can even call it a book, more like a novella. What is the point of everyone having a name that was just one letter? All it did was frustrate me and jar me out of reading. The storyline could have been interesting. And the one part I did like was the son growing throughout their struggles. But overall the writing style just didn't feel right to me and I just wanted the book to be over.

This was a puzzling but beautifully written book.

The lead character gives birth to baby Z in a post apocalyptic world. Together with R , the baby's father they flee from London as refugees, moving from place to place, until they reach the "border"- presumably Scotland.

The first person monologue is punctuated with what seem to be fragments of a religious? text predicting the Apocalypse. I wasn't sure how these excerpts were meant to interrelate with the text.

The strengths of the book are the descriptions of the relationship between mother and baby. Being stripped of the trappjngs of "civilisation" means that the characters are reduced to seeking food and shelter but also that human relationships become very focused or "super concentrated". Men seem to be on the periphery with female relationships being the most important ie mother-child or female friendships.

I guess that the author wants us to draw parallels with the lives of current refugees. It reminds me of the scenes in Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise " where all classes of society are fleeing Paris and survival, food and shelter become the only concerns ..

The style is lyrical, poetical and elliptical.

There is a lot of post apocalyptic/dystopian ficton around but this book has an eerie haunting quality which makes it stand out.

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a dystopian fiction lover’s dream. Set on the road, a family try to survive when their home of London is flooded beyond recognition. This story of survival is twisted and haunting.

Megan Hunter’s stop/start style of writing really connects the reader to the chaos and insecurity being felt by the main characters. The lack of character names again adds to the disjointed quality and you can’t help but feel the disparate nature between adults who knew what the world was like before and the children who will only ever know this crazy fight for survival.

Considering that The End We Start From is only a short book it does have a serious bite to it. I was left thinking about it long after it had ended.

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is available in November 2017.

For more information regarding Megan Hunter please visit her Twitter page (@meganfnhunter)

For more information regarding Grove Atlantic (@groveatlantic) please visit www.groveatlantic.com.

This book is a frightening reflection on the world today and our instinctual fight to survive. The book is set in the UK under the backdrop of a natural disaster, causing horrific floods. As the family escape from the floods in London and seek refuge, you cannot avoid the discomfort that comes with the realisation that this a picture of the current situation in Europe. That of fleeing refugees living in camps, struggling to survive. The parental need to protect the child and in particular the mother's fight for her and her child's survival is completely raw. A chilling tale, but well worth reading.

This is an unusual novella, set in the future when London is ruined by floods. The book opens with the birth of a baby. The father 'R' is not around and sends his friend 'S', who brings his friend 'J' to help. Throughout, characters are referred to only by their initial. I didn't like this, I found it confusing to remember who was who and to keep track of the characters. Perhaps this was the point - I have read in another review that the author was trying to portray confusion.

The storyline moves at a good pace and is easy to follow. The main character, who narrates throughout, and her partner 'R' and the baby leave London and initially live with 'R's' parents. It reminded me alot of The End of the World Running Club, except that was an asteroid strike and this was a flood. But in both cases these books make you think about what you would do if your home and town were evacuated - where would you go, how would you live etc.

I think I would have liked The End we Start From better if it had been a full book. The writing is good, but in places it is brief and moves along at too fast a pace. I guess I am saying I was disappointed that it was so short.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The stage is set for an apocalypse. Rising waters threaten the lives of a couple with a newborn. They flee their home and go through the motion of finding their way back. Told in a cryptic, metaphorical, and stunning narrative, the reader is meant to focus on the experience as if in a dream (or nightmare). We are shown chunks of information of what's happening or none at all - but it leaves an indelible impression. This is a short piece but be prepared to read much slower than usual to get the maximum effect of this introspective excursion of a mother and her child thrown into an unsettling scenario.

This is an excellent, beautiful and bleak short first novel from Megan Hunter. It's getting a lot of praise and I think it's going to be a big book this year. And it gets ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 from me.

I love the idea and concept of the story of a mother and her love for her new born son during a natural disaster type of dystopian world. However I couldn't get lost in the narration I could only appreciate the style and tone of the mother's voice. For me a felt it needed something more or something less.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley. Opinions are my own.

I can't say much about this book because it's so short, and therefore I'm not sure what's a spoiler. But it's a story about a woman and her baby and how they're surviving in a dystopian type of future. The writing is good and very descriptive at times, but it surprisingly lacks emotional depth. There's also no big, overarching plot points or character descriptors. For example, none of the characters have complete names. They're just referred to as letters - R, Z, O, etc. For the first third of the book, I thought this may be because the author wants the reader to latch onto the emotions of the story, which center around a woman trying to survive with her baby. But without anything of substance to hold onto, the story came off as shallow and underdeveloped. I have a lot of questions that I can't pose here because they may be spoilerly, and the story just fails to answer any of them. After the first third, I thought the book was hitting its stride, and I was really enjoying it. I read the entire thing in two sittings, which is rare for me. But as I was reaching the end, I realized I wasn't going to get any answers, and became annoyed and frustrated. I think this is one you can skip.

These are just my quick thoughts after just completing the book. A more comprehensive review will be coming on my YouTube channel (youtube.com/allisontheresa) and on my blog (allisontheresa7.wordpress.com).

It's immediately clear that Hunter is a talented, lyrical writer, which is why I'll give it 3 stars instead of 2, since I personally found it to be 'okay'. I love the maternal, feminine take on elevated science fiction, and playing with the genre to make it not only more highbrow but also to incorporate poetry and the abstract in what is usually straightforward, masculine, and technical. However, I think the plot leaves much to be desired, and it has perhaps strayed too far from conventional storytelling to be a compelling, cohesive piece. I am grateful that the author chose to limit the length, as I definitely wouldn't have made it through had I not known it was going to end soon. I think this book will appeal to readers of Atwood and possibly to people who enjoyed Grief is the Thing With Feathers-- to people looking specifically for literary fiction or prose-poetry, who are particularly drawn to feminist and science fiction themes, but I don't think it has broad appeal.

This book was amazing! I really had a lot of feels in this book! This will be on my to read again list for sure

A quick read. This sparse novel is full of emptiness; it requires the reader to fill in the gaps. Definitely experimental. It invites imagination and I like that.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the story ends up being more about new motherhood than about fleeing from rising waters and the struggle for survival in the chaos of a climate crisis. I was a little surprised by that, but nonetheless the details ring true and overall the book is a good, intriguing read.

Also, I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but wow do I love the cover art for the UK version. The US version is slated to publish in November 2017 and I hope they keep the same art for the American edition.

Special thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the advance review copy.

This is an interesting little book, more of a novella, about a woman just after she gives birth. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, almost like a diary, this story follows the nameless mother and her husband as they try to survive after all of London has become uninhabitable due to a massive flood. The couple moves around, looking for shelter, meeting others in the same circumstance. There is a minor dystopian feel to this book, although it is different from a typical dystopian novel.

All of the characters are named only with a single letter (e.g. R, Z), though I am not sure why the author chose to name them this way. It makes the story impersonal, and I had a hard time connecting with any characters. I think I would connect more with the main character if I were a mom like her because this story focuses heavily on her birth and her son and his impact on her life.

In fact, I think this book would appeal mostly to mothers, especially those who have lost their husbands or whose husbands are away for an extended time (e.g. at war).

I both liked and disliked the writing style. I didn't really understand what the author was trying to communicate at times, but the writing does have a beautiful quality.

The End We Start From doesn't feel much like a book to me, more like an outline for a book that never got written. There is no direct dialogue, although conversations do take place. There is lots of room to make the story deeper if it were expanded into a full-length book, lots of places to add emotion and suspense. Overall though, this is a story about finding hope in troubling times, and I appreciate the way the author communicated that message.

I enjoyed this slip of a novel, I thought the writing was beautiful and I wizzed through it. I found it almost poetic in it's style, which I found refreshing. I wasn't a fan of the religious (?) texts that intercepted the chapters though, I felt this was such a personal story and you were so in there with the mother that it was distracting and unnecessary to bring in these outside male influences.

I was surprised by how quickly I got through this book, mostly because I didn't look at the total page count before diving in. Sparse seems to be the keyword I've been seeing from other reviewers about this story, from its dialogue to prose and plot.

That's accurate.

There were some stylistic choices Hunter made that a reader is either going to like or despise. There's no dialogue, just narrative, and character names are reduced to a single letter. This story is also told in first person so we don't even know the name of the narrator.

I fell somewhere in the middle regarding how successful I thought this approach was. At times, the writing felt more like it was trying to be poetry than prose. When it hit the mark, it Hunter produced some evocative passages, but other descriptions felt clunky or unclear to me. Some of this may have been due to the novella's UK setting, although most of the metaphors that I felt didn't work had nothing to do with differences of culture.

Plot-wise, the narrator has just given birth as the water levels are rising on the wave of some unnamed, environmental catastrophe. Much of the description is aimed at Z, the narrator's son, and how the narrator is experiencing a longed-for motherhood in an unanticipated state of country-wide mayhem. Her husband, R, experiences a trauma associated with his parents, and eventually decides to take a separate path apart from his son and wife. This seems to affect the narrator greatly, but the prose is so succinct in this story that I don't feel like I got the full effect of their parting. This happened whenever a major event is described. Some readers might enjoy having a lot of the story left up to their imagination. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them.

If anything, this felt like experimental writing, a different way to tell a dystopian-type story. I appreciate the effort, even if it didn't feel the wholly effective. What I really wanted was more: a deeper understanding of the setting, and better character development that longer pieces by their very nature have the opportunity to explore more thoroughly.