I feel like I say this a lot, but this book is like nothing else I’ve ever read. It’s so sparsely written, it’s essentially poetry. The characters don’t even have full names – they are known only by their initials. We don’t know the narrator’s initial. Her son is the only name the reader hears, and then he becomes Z for the rest of the novel. It is a beautiful book; I could have highlighted whole pages.

I did find that I wanted to know more detail. We were given very little, meaning that we had to extrapolate from what was written to what was actually happening. However, I understood that this was the point of the novel. More detail would have taken away from the simplicity of the prose, and would have made it a very different book, and I think it would have made it less striking and unforgettable.

I really loved the focus on motherhood in an extraordinary circumstance. I also loved the genre – I am drawn to post-apocalyptic books at the moment, and this one definitely did not disappoint. Despite having read a lot of end-of-the-world/world-is-not-as-we-know-it books recently, this was very different to any of these and really did feel like I was reading something new and original. I thought the structure of the book was quite circular which was satisfying, too.

All in all, a wonderful, succinct read that really – cliche as it is – packed a punch.

This is a book is a book that I wish I've written. I can only aspire to write like them. It's a quick read, but you want to relish each sentence. You want to drown yourself in the story like the city does. I look forward to everything thing this author writes.

I am a sucker for the post-apocalyptic genre, so I gobbled up this book. I didn't understand all of the choices the author was making in regards to the characters and the reader's distance to them, so that kept me from fully appreciating the book's magic.

The main complaints I’ve heard about this novel are that the writing is too sparse and oddly chunked together. I would have to agree. I found this novel way to void of any descriptions that would attach me in any way to this novel.

None of the characters really have names, just a single initial to describe themselves. I was unable to feel any kind of attachment to any of the characters, and the protagonist drifts in and out of recognizable thoughts versus simply observations about the going-ons around her.

I suppose it’s science fiction, as in a dystopian future where some kind of war/environmental crisis is happening, but if Hunter gave us that information, I definitely missed it. They spend a lot of time in a refugee camp, but little is described about it other than the connections she makes there, and even those lines are not very clear. I imagine in part Hunter intends this book to be vague and wishy-washy because it seems to be a whirlwind of a crisis, so the storytelling itself mirrors how the main character might be feeling and experiencing the world. That being said, I couldn’t quite get into it. (I also can’t get into Cormac McCarthy, a similarly sparse author, so perhaps that’s on me and not this author.)

Thank goodness this book was so short. I was just intrigued enough by the novel to continue reading through to the end, but if it were any longer I definitely would not have finished it. The ending pleased me more than most of the rest of the book, a little more succinct, but still refusing to wrap up too many loose ends. However, there is a tinge of hopefulness that brings the ending together.

A longed for child is born, but his mother’s waters aren’t the only ones breaking as London is submerged below floodwaters.

Days later, she, her husband and their baby have to leave London in search of safety. They head north, often sleeping in their car or finding solitary spots away from other humans in a newly dangerous country. As their baby grows they find and leave new families, trying to work their way to either an old home or new seeking.

Their baby thrives against all odds, not knowing anything of the world before he doesn’t know its loss. His parents find things much harder.

This is a beautiful poetic read. It shares the sense of dislocation and a narrowing of the world that most new mothers experience. It is written in the first person from the perspective of the mother, and it shows the world beyond her baby in snatched, out-of-focus glimpses whilst her child takes up most of her vision.

The only thing problem with that is that because the world beyond her baby seems to be just a dream to her there is rarely any sense of urgency or fear, she’s living in a world where food is scarce and civilisation is scared but she seems at most wearingly accepting. It’s a believable emotion for a lot of the story but there should be a few spikes of fear.

The writing is a joy though, haunting and lyrical. I look forward to her next book.

Four Bites

My Thoughts: Evidently, The End We Start From caused quite a stir at the 2016 London Book Fair, and I’m sorry to say that I just don’t get it. I was expecting a young mother experiencing life in a dystopian world and that’s what I got, yet still it fell flat. We got very little information about her new dystopian reality, few explanations for why it happened or why things improved. Instead we experienced life in refugee camps and on a rather comfortable private island. The main focus of Hunter’s novella was young motherhood in a trying time. Nothing all that much out of the ordinary.

Some have praised Hunter’s writing as lyrical and poetic. I found it taxing. The book was written in very short, choppy bits that often didn’t fit together. It asked the reader to do too much of the work in connecting elements of her story. In addition, none of the characters had names, just letters to represent them (the child was Z, his father, R). I dislike this trend of not giving characters actual names. It seems lazy. I believe Megan Hunter had elements of a very good story. Had she fleshed it out more, that book may have been worthy of the hype surrounding it.

I have DNF'ed this one because this type of narration confuses me and I don't have the time to put that amount of effort into one book that several pages in doesn't look really interesting, sorry.

I'm sure that there will be many comparisons the "The Road", as there was a common theme. When the boat came into the story, I thought, "Ok, this is a little to close to "The Road", but I like the direction it took. Overall a quick and enjoyable read.

I don't know what I feel about this book. I didn't appreciate it, without a doubt, yet I didn't generally loathe it. It is the composition style I think, that murdered the vibe for me. The story takes after a lady who has recently conceived an offspring at the beginning of a war of sorts. It is set in a tragic world that is post war yet I do not understand what isn't right or what is going on. The written work is dubious and kind of non-graphic. There is visualization there, nor characterisation, only portrayals of things an infant sets in the outcome of the war.

Having perused such striking and delightful tragic and post war stories I observed this to be distressfully deficient. Astonishing on the grounds that it has awesome reviews on Goodreads. I am certain there is a group of people for this book, yet for me it was quite recently not sufficiently alive.

I loved the concept of this book and the blurb made it sound lile exactly the kind of dystopian novel I usually love to read. This one just didn't work for me though.

The style of writing was difficult to engage with, the story and writing were so sparse that it was difficult for me to engage with the story.

I did like that the story was held together by the development of the baby, Z, as this was a fresh perspective on dystopian settings. Unfortunately it just wasn't for me.

This is one of those stories where you don't get enough hard fact to string the details together and so you're trying to pull out the events from between the emotion that fills the writing. It's all thoughts, feelings, fleeting moments.

I've read a book before where the characters were just going by their first letters, so that wasn't a very big shock for me however the writing style is either hit or miss. For me it was a miss. It's a story of a new mother who finally gets a child and when he finally comes into the world, London is flooded and the society is plunged into disarray.

I felt like the image of the father, R, really confused me. It was all about guesswork, and if I had to explain his arc, I guess I would say that he just couldn't take the uncertainty and burden of responsibility anymore but it's hard to say as we have hardly any insight into his ideas or feelings. I got the impression he was unprepared for being a father and then the situation worsened and he just wanted to be on his own.

I also didn't get what the mother was all about, she was driven forward by her child but aside from that she had now goal, no movement, nothing to make her more sympathetic or relatable. And I missed that.

Either way, sadly, this was a big miss for me.

A short but compelling story set in a future with a woman giving birth to a much yearned for child just as London is struck with massive flooding. Her husband goes out to find food, and doesn't come back. The novel is written in stream of consciousness and while there are spurts of brilliance, the story is told in a distanced way that it was hard to empathize with the characters. I found it odd that the author chose to call characters by initials instead of names. Made them all faceless and unmemorable. Maybe that was the point, but it made the story less interesting. Still and all a good read.

Thank you, Netgalley, for the e-review copy of this book.

This is an odd little book, one I had to think about for awhile before determining how to rate it. The story tells of a cataclysmic event which causes massive flooding in London and throughout the country (whether other countries are impacted is unknown) forcing massive evacuations and starting life over in post-apocalyptic conditions.

As the book begins, the main character is hours away from giving birth to her first child. We never know the name of the narrator, nor of any of the other characters. The narrator is not identified at all, the other characters only by an initial. I don't understand the reasoning for that; though it may be novel, it didn't add anything to the book.

To me, the book is about life and resiliency. Though a catastrophe occurred, the new mother is totally focused on her newborn son, enthralled with him, taking joy in everything he does. To her, everything else is secondary. The child grows, the waters recede, the damaged earth renews itself, people return to their previous homes. Everything is forever changed, but life goes on.

A short book and a quick read, I found the author's prose almost poetic. I'm still not quite sure what to make of this book, but I will look for Megan Hunter's next book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic Publishers for allowing me to read a e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When I asked this book from #Netgalley and when I started reading the novella I was not aware that tee author is known poetess, but when I started reading it, it seemed to me that I was reading strange poetry, not the usual poetry, but a poetry where instead of lines are paragraphs. and some those paragraphs are passages from The Book.

So this somewhat weird story, #TheEndWeStartFrom, is actually a good story about the end of the world as we know it. It's not an panicky story about the horrors the end contains, although there are the horrors too, but it is about the hope the human kind has, about children, about mother's love, about the bond between child and parent and between partners.

It's and beautiful and terrible poem that is not a poem. It's series of pictures from a life that begins at the beginning of disaster, how it outlives the disaster and gets ready to start a new normal life.

I was very kindly allowed to read and review The End We Start From by Megan Hunter from @groveatlantic via @netgalley and I'm so glad, because it's a brilliant short novel. Set in a loosely defined post-apocalypse London and U.K., a mother gives birth to a baby and documents its growth after she escapes the floodwaters that envelop London. The narrative reads like a diary, but not just any diary. The prose is beautiful but economical, practical but heart-breaking. This is a short tale without elaborate description, and yet it somehow spans the breadth of human emotion and, particularly, a sense of how women survive and protect children in a crisis. I devoured it in one sitting of a late afternoon when I should have been working on my PhD. Well worth reading.

this slim novel was stylistically interesting but overall rather disengaging. I think that lovers of the Southern Reach series would very much enjoy this.

Coming in at only 140 pages, Megan Hunter's fascinating experimental novel is more a prose-poem or novella, but with the intensity of a short story. The text is divided by *** and interspersed with quasi biblical quotations. Everything has been pared down to the minimum: sentences are often so short as to be almost cryptic and names are only initials.
In a near future London floods catastrophically:
An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children. Ours.
The unnamed narrator has just given birth (to Z) so she and her partner, R head for the hills with millions of others, like mass hitchhiking with no lifts.  The horror of sudden disaster and the struggle to survive is brought home by the stark contrast between the universality of what happens to them and the particulars of baby Z's developmental progress:
here he is in his serious reaching, his controlled opening and sucking and swallowing... Z is trying to roll over... like someone trying to turn over a car with his bare hands. Impossible.
Megan Hunter's debut novel is a tour de force of concision and emotional intensity. Not a word is wasted:
Here are some of R's words for what happened: tussle, squabble, slaughter.
A sudden death is described almost as briefly as a telegram: 
Panic. Crush. G. Panicked. Crushed.
There is also room for dark humour. When the family is trying to reach safety there is the disconnect between their previous comfortable, on-line lives and the present:
He has not spent hours poring over comparative reviews of refugee camps.
Without giving too much away this short tale of disaster could be bleak, but ends with the triumph of hope over adversity, the human will to keep going and survive. I'm working on a similar theme in my new novel so now that I've read The end we start from I'm really going to have to up my game! 
*****