This post-apocalyptic fiction sees a very-near-future version of Great Britain in a state of veritable panic due to the increasing sea water levels. A mother-to-be is living in terror of her uncertain future. A father-to-be is haunted by claustrophobia in a sinking world. A baby is about to be born, and knows nothing of the predicament he is arriving in to.

Each character was not named and, instead, only graced with an initial to divide them from other characters. This had a two-fold effect on me, as a reader. It made my affinity with the individual characters decrease, and yet heightened the sense of reality about the events taking place. A name denotes an individual, and by taking away the character's individuality away, it could be anyone this book was focusing on. It made their horror and fear my own. It also made them seem more two-dimensional and unreal, and it was hard to separate these two conflicting feelings.

The reasoning behind the events that occur is another of the many things withheld from the reader, along with the lack of character names. This made the book a dually sparse and easy, as well as an intricate and demanding, read.

The sparsity of the text is where the power of it stems. It is unique, in that respect. But this sparsity is also what distanced me from so much of the story. These conflicting feelings haunted both my overall enjoyment of the entire reading and my understanding of every aspect of the plot. It is also the reason for my middle-of-the-road rating, as I am utterly unaware on where my feelings on this should lay.

This slender novel was the subject of a bidding frenzy at the London Book Fair and my Twitter feed has been singing its praises for the past few months. I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy so I decided to see what all the commotion is about.

The story is set in the UK of the near future. An unprecedented environmental catastrophe occurs and much of London lies underwater. Chaos reigns - nobody was prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. The narrator is forced to flee her apartment with husband R and baby Z in order to escape the "Gulp Zone." They make it to the house of R's parent's in the country which is safe, but contains limited supplies. Food is scarce and people are desperate. This young family will have to battle against all odds to survive in an unforgiving, alien landscape.

Great, yet another dystopian tale, I hear you say. Well what sets this story apart is the writing style. It has quite a poetic lean and there are some striking turns of phrase, as Hunter imagines the fallout to such a crisis. The hungry survivors of the flood "have started to look like models, all visible angles." The silence in a deserted house is described as "a textured, grainy quiet, a thickness to to stumble through." The narrator awakes on another uncertain morning "still crusty-eyed and climbing out of dreams."

But not all of it works, and there were lines that baffled me. "The idea came as a miniaturized image, a crisp packet in the oven." Not quite sure what that one is about. And "the stacked supply in the cupboard that grew shorter every day, like a reverse child" just feels plain awkward to me.

It's all very vague and mysterious, and to be honest I would have appreciated a little more depth and detail. The whole story is only 160 pages long and it needs more meat on its bones. It works best when it explores the joys and fears of motherhood, and the innocence of a growing baby, oblivious to the turmoil unfurling around him. In patches, The End We Start From is a haunting, lyrical parable about climate change but I finished it underwhelmed and disillusioned about what might have been.

Spent a couple days thinking about this book. While I enjoyed the premise - following the process and the aftermath of a great flood from a new mother's point of view; the execution was confusing and disjointed. From replacing names with letters only and the almost diary like quality of the writing meant that I was confused and lost for most of the book. A story is there, it's just hidden by choppy writing and an inarticulate storyline.

A very different type of dystopian novel from any I have read before. With a focus on its main character's role as a mother, it brings a human edge to a pessimistic vision of the future. Very moving and lyrical – plus a quick and easy read.

An interesting short read that keeps you involved to the end.

This was a different read for me. I've been trying to broaden my horizons this year, and so far I'm incredibly glad I have!
This was a tense and powerful read. A touching but also eerie story which I couldn't put down.

Excellent story! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

This is what many people would call a novella. It is a short well written in places humorous story about a woman and her baby in the middle of an environmental crisis. They manage to create a family in the middle of chaos. The story is beautifully written and moving.

I'm not sure what I read here, but it was good. It was different from what I have read during the last years. It was weirdly beautiful. There were so many things in this book that rang true for me.
It's hard to describe and hard to put a finger to a precise thing that I liked about this novella. Let's suffice to say, I liked all of it.

At one level, this beguiling debut novel(la) by Megan Hunter can be enjoyed as a work of science fiction, or even as a Mieville-like piece of "new weird". Its setting is a contemporary London made strange by an inexplicable environmental phenomenon - the waters are rising, swallowing cities and towns and bringing about social mayhem. Right at the onset of the deluge, the narrator gives birth to a son - Z. Days later, mother and child have to head to the North, to avoid the advancing waters. What follows is a sort of "Baby's First Album" with a post-apocalyptic twist, the child's perfectly natural struggle for survival mirrored by society's attempt to adapt to a new way of living. The link between the two lies in the recurring water imagery - Z's birth in the very first page is marked, of course, by a "breaking of the waters" ("I am waterless, the pool of myself spreading slowly past my toes") reflecting the ominous "waters" which are threatening the city. The novella is, in a way, a celebration of new motherhood, but the dystopian backdrop eschews sentimentality leaving only a warm, essential humanity.

Going through earlier reviews of this book, I noted that several readers were put off by the spareness of the prose; others were struck by a sense that the premise of the novel was not fully realised. Admittedly, several details are left undefined and the plot (if one can speak of one) could be summarised in a half-page paragraph (in large font...). However, I felt that Hunter was aiming for the pregnant conciseness of poetry, preferring metaphor and allusion to a more typical working out of characters and storyline. (She is, after all, a published poet). Indeed, I often found myself re-reading certain passages, delighted by a surprising image or turn of phrase.

I also think that there is in the writing a deliberate attempt to reference mythological storytelling, and to make of this tale a sort of universal parable. Thus, although we get to share some of the characters' most intimate moments, they are only identified by a letter (for instance, the narrator's husband is "R", his parents "G" and "N"). We know that the boy is named "Zeb" (which, incidentally, means "wolf", surely no coincidence) but from then on he is referred to as "Z" (last letter of the alphabet - possibly, the end we start from?) The mythical element is also emphasized through strange italicized passages interspersed in the text, which seem to mimic Biblical apocalyptic imagery - just to give a taste:

In these days we shall look up and see the sun roaming across the night and the grass rising up. The people will cry without end, and the moon will sink from view...

I read the book in a couple of sittings but I suspect that, like poetry, it merits to be revisited for it to further reveal its mysteries.

The abbreviated length went perfectly with the sparse writing. I'm not sure if I'd have wanted to read 300 pages of that style, but as it was it worked well. I enjoyed the contrast of a hopeless situation with the endless possibility that exists in a child.

I love the idea of this book more than the actual finished product. Water levels are rising, quickly, and residents must flee London immediately. A woman, her new-born son and husband leave for his parents home on higher ground, but it seems no matter where they go, the water follows them. It was hard to develop any empathy for the characters, there wasn’t really any development there, and each character is known only by an initial, R or N, even the baby is just Z. My other issue with this story is the length; it’s very short, novella length at best, and this was a story that deserved a much larger stage.