Talk about a beautiful book! The cover is stunning - gold foil that shimmers in the light?!!? Yes, please!

A few days after giving birth to her son, Z, a woman and her husband are forced to evacuate London as it floods. They are forced to become refugees as they go from shelter to shelter. As if new motherhood isn't terrifying enough, this novel forces us to look at the bond and love between a mother and her child. While you'd expect it to be very dark and gloomy, the book is filled with love and hope. The mother's spirit is strong and resilient as she raises a baby - that continues to grow despite the odds.

I didn't expect to be captivated by this book. I misjudged its size (only 160 pages) as being puny. I wasn't sure how good it could be with such little content. BUT, I WAS SOOOO WRONG! This {small} book packs a punch! I read it in one sitting because I could not walk away. I had to know what happened to this family!

As we as a global family face the uncertainties related to global warming and catastrophic weather events, this one is definitely worth adding to your list of must-reads!

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter has been on my to be read list for a few months now but a reading slump meant I only got around to reading it today.
I was disappointed in this book and found it difficult to read from the beginning. Firstly, I didn’t like the way the characters in the book we referred to only by letters rather than by names. I felt that this distanced the reader too much from them.
It only took me two hours to read The End We Start From but I can’t say that was because I was eager to find out what happened. Equally I cannot say it was because I hated it and wanted to get it over and done with. The best I can say is that this book made me indifferent.
The book begins with an unnamed pregnant woman about to give birth in London. Sometime before the birth reports start to come in off floods in the capital and there are some suggestions she and her husband R may need to move.
Before they can move she goes into hospital to give birth and whilst there hears news reports stating that her flat is no under water. Later R brings the news in to her in person.
When she is discharged from hospital she and R and baby Z head for his parents house in the mountains.
As the book progresses there are riots and refugee camps and abandonment but through it all the woman clings to the hope she feels when she sees her little boy.
I would say The End We Start From was nothing special but it was readable.

I recommend this fabulous debut novel to those who like literary fiction with strong motherhood themes and a tender, understated love story. Hunter writes with a poetic, first-person style that resonates like a personal journal. The narrator never names herself; in this sense she's an archetypal everywoman or, more specifically, an archetypal new mother. She refers to other characters by initials. Her beloved is R and their infant son will be named Z. Water imagery flows throughout, connecting amniotic dream-states of pregnancy, birth, and nursing with a cataclysmic flood that displaces millions of people from London and the surrounding area.
Under the surface, this is a flow-of-consciousness story about the terrors of new motherhood, recounting the emotional, physical, and spiritual adjustments one makes. The exterior plot is a natural disaster survival struggle, where a young family seeks refuge in a series of more or less risky situations. These two strands of narrative are braided with fragments of myth. Incredible book for a rainy day - the near-future setting is so close to current realities with worldwide floods and other natural disasters.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic for providing me with a copy of Megan Hunter's novel, The End We Start From, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT - In the not-too-distance future, a major flood has destroyed London and the unnamed narrator must try to survive with her newborn baby.

LIKE- The End We Start From is a survival story at a break-neck pace. Although due to family visiting, I had to read it in small chunks, Hunter's novella can easily be read in a single sitting. Due to the fast pacing and intense subject of the story, I would highly recommend setting aside a few uninterrupted hours and diving in. 

I liked that Hunter left a lot of mystery, she does not spell things out. Although we know that there has been extreme flood, we don't know more details. For example, we don't know the range and extent of the disaster. This put me in the mindset of the narrator, as she struggles to survive with a lack of direct information. The larger scope of the disaster is really irrelevant to this particular story. The focus is on her survival, the immediate situation, and deals with the rumors and misinformation that she receives as she moves to different refugee camps. She must assess her best move on the fly, including dealing with dangers.

The End We Start From reminded me of The Walking Dead or Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road. The themes and general story line are not a new idea, however, The End We Start From remains compelling because of the narrator and the exploration of how humans react in extreme circumstances. 

The ending was very interesting to me. It switches from a story of physical survival to one of emotional survival. Hunter ends the story at a precarious moment. The only thing that I was left feeling certain of, is that the narrator is a survivor and will continue to survive. 

DISLIKE- I'm a bit uncertain as to whether only naming the characters by their first initial was a good move. As a reader, I sometimes found it to be confusing and distracting. I had to reread sections to remind myself of a character, which took me out of the story. From a storytelling standpoint, it creates a necessary barrier that the narrator must put up for her own survival. It also quickens the pacing.

RECOMMEND- Yes. The End We Start From is a fast-paced and emotional journey. It's filled with danger and tension. I never quite knew where it was heading and I found the ending to be quite a surprise. I'd seek out future novels by Hunter.

The writing style, the initials, and the lack of description means that The End We Start From by Megan Hunter takes work to follow and interpret. At times, it's too much, and the book feels like it's trying too hard to be original and philosophical. At times, it works. I am left somewhere in between. I will remember it, but as a book that I am unsure about. As it is a debut novel, I will look for more of Megan Hunter's work to see what direction she pursues next.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2018/01/the-end-we-start-from.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

I read this book last month and still can't decide exactly how I feel about this book. It was confusing, weird and yet something different. There was some hidden things behind the story.

I certainly liked the style in which the story was presented. It was something different that I had never seen. I read Letter From Skye last year and quite loved it, partially because of its format. The whole book was in letters. However, The End We Start From was quite different. It was more like personal notes.. broken in between. It seems to be an unique idea but sometimes it just felt weird to read.

This story is about dystopian era where London is suddenly submerged in water. The story is from the perspective of a young mother. She is thirty-nine weeks pregnant when she has to run to save her family from the havoc that has grasped London. She shares the experience of giving birth to her son "Z". The characters are not named in this, rather has been called just by their initials.

After the birth of Z, she flee with her husband R and take refuge with R's parents. Even there, they are not safe and are constantly in fear about the dreaded. While the whole world seems uncertain and R is behaving all strange, the woman is all lost in her motherly feelings and busy in nourishing his son. She has been constantly shown amazed by the miracle that she has created.

When they move to camp later, where most of the refugees were staying, R panicked and he left the camp and went to find a better shelter for his family. During this time, the woman is forced to move to another camp and there she made friends and embraced her motherhood while waiting for R to return.

Megan Hunter words sounded lyrical and as if she has chosen them carefully. What I feel is, she wanted to give a different kind of experience to her readers. Though I appreciate this prose like writing, the story itself was lacking of plot. There could have been so much more in the story but I felt as if the main focus was on the woman itself and her motherhood.

Being a dystopian novel I think the story should have been somewhat focused on that situation in which London was at that time. The narration was definitely weak. Also, I am not that much happy with the way the characters names were given. Though it was an interesting idea, I struggled to remember the names and the relationships. Most of the time I kept wondering what will happen if all the letters in the alphabet are used :D It constantly bugged with throughout the story, making it more confusing.

I guess Megan Hunter wanted to depict some important issues of the society like environmental changes and its effect on humans, but in my opinion, telling the story in this manner definitely failed that aspect.

The thing that I am certain that I liked about this book, is the depiction of feelings of a new mother. Though out of context, those proses were beautiful. The feeling of holding your son for the first time in your arms, his first laugh, his first word.. all these moments were captured beautifully.

Though this book didn't work for me in the way I expected it to be (from the cover), I am sure that many will like this unique manner of writing. The story had so much potential but I feel that execution was not done well.

Different type of read for me. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. It was also choppy and hard to read- I read it was a poetic style. Not for me. I would recommend to friends that I know would enjoy this writing style and dystopian genres.

A beautiful book that made me angry at the same time. The book is extremely short, reading much like a short story. I finished it in less than an hour. The prose is magnificent and reads like poetry, but it is frustratingly sparse. Two-to-four lines before a break and just enough detail to leave you wanting more but hanging. All the characters were only known by their first initial... Z, O, R... To me, this felt like the sketches of a first draft in which the details hadn't been fully mapped out. I both loved it and hated it.

*I received an advance readers copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.*

This book was an interesting debut, with a unique writing style. It was prose with poetic timing and spacing, and painted a surprisingly deep picture, considering that all of the characters are known only by an initial and there is no conversation. I am interested to see where the author goes from here.
3.5 stars

"Our city is here, somewhere, but we are not. We are all untied, is the thing. Untethered, floating, drifting, all these things."

This was such a weird and uncomfortable read. While I thought the style in which this short story/novella was written was rather artistic, I disliked the crude manner in which everything was described.

This story tells about a futuristic dystopian era where London is suddenly overtaken by water. Families are forced from their homes, and many separated in the flooding. Written from the perspective of a young mother, she details the experience while nurturing her new son "Z" (Zeb but characters are only mentioned by the first letter in their name) through explanations in the past and present tenses and sometimes somewhere in-between.

Along the way, she is separated from her spouse, "R" and was left to fend for herself and child. While there is certainly a lot going on in their lives with trying to survive, Z serves as a lantern in the dark to those around. The reader passes through stages of the book as Z grows from an infant into a toddler. Everything around him is so dismal and hopeless, yet, he lightens the mood with his meager but notable milestones.

"Luck is one of those words that has no meaning any more, if it ever did."

While I've never quite read a book in this fashion, I appreciated its attempts at originality. However, I believe it may serve other readers better, who may enjoy the writing style of someone similar to Margaret Atwood. The vulgar ways of explaining different things (mainly with Z and the motherly roles required of the main character) were most off-putting. I couldn't help but be reminded of the descriptive writing tactics of The Handmaid's Tale which I absolutely loathed.

Overall, I appreciated the artist manner in which the author told this story. However, the off-putting way in which she described things and need for more atmosphere and grounding made this less enjoyable in my eyes.

Vulgarity: There are a few swear words, I believe. The entire writing style could be considered as vulgar (as stated above) as the author uses descriptive and unpleasant ways of describing bodily functions and reactions between mother and child.
Sexual content: While there are no scenes to be spoken of, there are references to sex in somewhat graphic manners. In particular, in the beginning where the main character is discussing her plans for childbirth, along with reminiscing about her significant other and how he "moved inside her."
Violence: None.

1.5 stars.

Agh. I really thought I would love this. I'm a huge fan of dystopian novels, and I love reading poetic, elegant writing. I wasn't sure how they would work together, but after reading this book - I'm not too sure it works.

There were definitely places where the writing style was beautiful, but overall I think it worked against the story. Because it was so soft and airy, the story lost a lot of its intensity and speed - things that are typically very important to a dystopian universe. In fact, if I hadn't read the blurb that said that this book followed a newborn as London was flooded, I'm not sure I would have known that that was what was happening.

In addition to that, it felt really hard to connect with the characters because they were named only by a single alphabet letter, and sometimes I got confused with who was who. Understandably all of these aspects come together to make a disconnected and jarring writing style that parallels the story's situation, but it was simply a little hard to understand for me.

If you're looking for some really beautiful quotes to write down, then go for The End We Start From. But if you want a true dystopian with harrowing action, look elsewhere.

This book is brilliant; I finished reading it a couple of months ago and still find it coming to mind even now. This on face value is a dystopian novel set in a London that is badly flooded and local people are having to flee to safety. The main character is heavily pregnant and resists leaving but is eventually forced to. What follows is her journey as she tries to survive in a rapidly changing landscape but it felt to me that it was really more about motherhood and all the changes and anxieties that this stage in life brings. At times the rising water seems to mirror the anxiety around her new baby and how they were going to get through. This is a short book but it really is worth reading it slowly and making time to take in all the layers within the story. I highly recommend this book.

The End We Start From focused on the devotion of a mother to her son following a family who had to flee from their flat after a cataclysmic flood. At parts, the prose is beautifully written, even poetic. However, I finished the book with unanswered questions, such as what happened to R? Overall, I came away wishing there was more substance.

An original dystopian story that focuses on motherhood and the lengths we'll go to protect our family. This story is very short, and doesn't worry too much about the details of disaster, but instead on the human stories that sometimes don't get told in a crisis. The writing was sparse and beautiful and the story haunting. I read this in a single sitting over a month ago now, but the story has stayed with me. Recommended.

This short, sparse novel is an intimate twist on the dystopia, focusing on motherhood and survival. The language is spare and poetic - beautiful but I felt sometimes that I would have appreciated more fleshed out characters and scenes. This novel definitely inspired me to look out for more of Hunter's work.

Motherhood is complex. Your body changes, your identity changes. THE END WE START FROM takes these overwhelming changes and throws in an apocalyptic event for good measure. The story starts as the unnamed narrator, with her husband and friends, prepares for a water birth. In the first few pages the prose is purple, drenched in metaphor rather than conveying the narrator’s frame of mind. It’s not until the narrator gives birth and goes to her in-laws that the story really starts.

As the flooding, rationing, and fear-mongering build, the narrator develops a stronger connection with her child and builds new personal relationships. While living in the refugee camps is hard, she’s able to find other women to befriend. The woman, who once joked about mommy groups, now finds comfort with other mothers. Though life is tough, THE END WE START FROM never loses hope and never strays into bleakness.

I wasn’t sure what to make of THE END WE START FROM. This uncertainty was worsened by the fact that the blurb calls it a novel. It’s not. It’s a novella formatted as poetry. The structure of the book may be the factor that turns readers away. There are chunks of text, interrupted by ample amount of whitespace. The writing is prosaic and beautiful. There’s a lot of personal truth buried in short sentences. But it’s not the novel that it claims to be.

Although I loved writing, the story, and the characters, the book still felt incomplete. It’s a story that should have been a long-form novel. It feels like the author is dipping toes into the water, testing out the audience before publishing a similar novel. THE END WE START FROM is an enjoyable option if you’re looking for a shorter story or if you want a hopeful take on the apocalypse. I’m definitely excited to see if THE END WE START FROM evolves.

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Grove Press on November 7, 2017

The End We Start From imagines that a mother gave birth to a baby, known in the novel as Z, during an apocalyptic event that, at the moment of birth, is characterized by rising flood waters. The brief novel combines mommy lit with post-apocalyptic fiction, two popular genres that, in this case at least, do not merge well. Babies are not interesting characters and the mother who narrates the novel doesn’t have much more personality than Z.

The exact nature of the catastrophe is ill-defined. The flooding might have been brought about by global warming, but it seems quite sudden and there are bullet holes in buildings, which might or might not have something to do with the crisis. Television persists for a time, but the news has suddenly become depressingly relevant to the characters’ lives, so they take a brief pause from watching the talent show channel to get a sense of what’s happening in the world. Floods lead to famine and the loss of internet and cellular service. Why? We’re never told.

The end of life as she knows it has apparently been coming for some time and, while the narrator lived in fear of it, she thought that having a baby would make the fear go away. It might have been more rational to fear bringing a baby into a world that is ending. Or to establish a residence in higher ground.

Eventually the protagonist and Z and Z’s daddy R all travel north from London, where they find refugee camps. R goes off in search of a better place to raise the family, leaving the narrator and their baby to make it on their own. After that, the narrator misses R, although I wondered why since abandoning his family in a crisis seems unhelpful.

The narrator starts to travel with O and O’s baby C. O knows about a boat they can take (presumably to Scotland). How she knows where and when to meet the boat in the absence of cell service is one of many mysteries the novel fails to explain.

Given the apocalyptic setting, the journey from London to Scotland seems remarkably easy, as does the eventual resolution of the crisis. The narrator spends most of her time fretting, but her fretting is more about motherhood than starvation or flooding or gang violence or the other terrors that vaguely lurk in the novel’s background but that never seem to pose an actual threat. Those distant concerns appear to have no impact on our intrepid mommy as she waits for baby’s next bowel movement.

There is something to be said for exploring the mundane (baby’s first tooth, baby's first step) in a chaotic environment, to focus the reader on a new mother’s myopic focus on her baby as a defining characteristic of motherhood. Motherhood has apparently opened the narrator’s heart to love; she loves everyone she does not fear. The novel has some value in the way it delivers messages about motherhood, but the messages would have been more powerful if the external world had been more fully or carefully developed.

The novel also doles out mommy wisdom, like “There is no skill. There is only another person, smaller than you.” Mommy lit is replete with similar mommy wisdom; no fresh insights are to be found here.

The novel is short, the story told in snippets. The minimalist style is probably meant to cut out all that is unimportant in favor of descriptions of how Z feels to the narrator while Z is drinking from the narrator’s nipple, or how Z’s eyes are starting to look like R’s, or the things that Z picks up and drops. I got the sense that some of the gaps in information would have been a good bit more interesting than what the narrator chose to tell us. I also got the sense that the missing information is missing because Megan Hunter couldn’t imagine plausible details with which to plug the gaps, or didn’t want to be bothered. The snippet form of storytelling sometimes works well (I recently read Ultraluminous, where the form is used to great advantage), but The End We Start From puts so little flesh on the skeleton that it feels like an outline for a novel, not a finished product.

The novel’s strength is its prose. In Scotland, where seeds still grow, the narrator remarks, “We have arrived at the non-happening, it seems: the invisible growth of Z’s body, the tiny increments of our meals coming out of the soil.” But in the end, the book seems like a collection of strong sentences that never give birth to a living story.

This was such an interesting book, in that the author was able to tell a great story without telling too much of the story. Every single word counted.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. “
T.S. Eliot. Four Quartets

This haunting parable is about just that - beginnings and endings. The words that keep coming to mind to describe this unusual story are “poignant” and “beautiful”.
Ms Hunter has created a unique work of art. It is unlike any book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of dystopian books. The prose reads like poetry, sparse and full of imagery. It is that much more powerful due to this simple sparse style. You won’t soon forget this one.
At the beginning, a woman gives birth. She and her husband are delighted with the baby, but, gradually, we become aware that something is very wrong with the outside world. Most of London has been destroyed by a flood. They live in a highrise above the floodwaters, but eventually are forced to flee to camps in outlying areas. Terrible dangers there are hinted at but not described fully, and these dangers keep them moving from place to place.
To avoid spoilers, I won’t describe more. You’ll have to read it to find out what happens. And I strongly recommend you do. I enjoyed this memorable book very much and think you will too.

Note: I received an advance copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review
Title: The End We Start From
Author: Megan Hunter
Genre: YA/Science/Family
Rating: ***
Review: The end we start from is writing in a style I have never come across before and it was intriguing. The characters have no names although there are referred by letters. During a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, an unnamed woman along with her husband R give birth to their first child, Z. After the slightly traumatic birth the woman, R & Z head to R’s parents home to introduce them to their first grandchild.
Shortly after seeking shelter in their in-law’s place while R builds one of their one. R’s mother G doesn’t return from a supply run and its weight is felt by them all except baby Z who remains ignorant of the disaster unfolding all around them. The unnamed mother ponders in moments alone, what is to be alive, not the meaning of life, but what it is to breath, to blink, to live.
When R and N leave for a supply run, Z is left alone with his mother and she bathes in the joys of motherhood and just being at one with herself and her child. Although as the days pass she does worry for them, that they might not return causing her precious Z to suffer but she puts it at the back of her mind be tending his every single need. When R finally returns it is without N lost just like G, but R, Z and the woman manages to escape whatever is happening outside although they are quite vague about what it is. I also like the religious mirroring almost comparing R and the woman’s struggle to that of Noah during the Great Flood.
As Z grows older and the world around them gets more and more difficult to survive in, R decides he must leave but only for a little while. As we reach the halfway mark in the story the woman has been raising Z among the other women at the camp when she finds out she is pregnant again but quite soon after they must move again because the camp is no longer safe. O and the woman get close to the water with the help of D and L along with their children, but D and L don’t wait to come with them, so the women and children move onto the next part of the journey together with their children.
Despite knowing somewhere deep inside of herself the woman continues to hope that R will find her that they will be a family again but with each passing day she sees her son growing quickly. Teething, crawling, talking and so much more that his father will never have the chance to experience with him and the thought that Z will leave her too scares her. After a while they pair return home although nothing will ever be the same again with R gone. She struggles to adjust to the new life she is given, being a mother, working and raising her child alone when she has always had someone there with her helping her along the way.
In the end the book does have a happy ending when R miraculously is found, and the family are reunited and return to their home, and it is almost as if they never left that everything that happened between them leaving and returning never existed. Overall, I found this novel to be unique and very entertaining although it is a confusing story to wrap your head around.