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.

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.

Beautifully written and moving. A novella about a mother caring for her newborn baby against a backdrop of global catastrophe.

I liked the book although I felt confused while I was reading. The prose is not something I'm used to read, I would like to read more information about the characters, few more deep thoughts. They have no names and they are represented by letters of the alphabet like O, R, Z... I'm not a mother but as I can see, Megan Hunter portrays the mother/child relationship pretty good. I believe I got the point, the main character has became a mother in a dystopian world and she's struggling with all the problems they are going to and also for having a life to take care of. She has loads of insecurity and worries and she keep strong for her son. The writing is like a poem, you can read quickly and still enjoy every single word.

'The window is completely black, the darkness total. We are the only people here. The truth: we've always felt like this.'

I picked up Megan Hunter's The End We Start From late last night when I could not sleep. In the space of an hour, I devoured it in one sitting. Her sparse yet lyrical story of a mother and child surviving a newly perilous world simply blew we away.

Like many others, I have read many books from the apocalyptic genre. Often these stories are a cautionary tale filled with backstories and complicated catastrophic disasters. The End We Start From strips the genre back to its bare essentials.

Our focus throughout is the relationship between mother and child. From the beginning, we are given the impression that this is the only world that really matters ans what follows is a novel that becomes a beautiful ode to motherhood.

We never know the mother, or in fact any other character, by name. We meet her just as 'the moment of birth looms ahead...like the loss of virginity did, as death does.' She brings Z into a dangerous world, but despite this he grows into a bouncing baby boy interested only in breast milk and achieving milestones.

Z is undoubtedly the shining light of hope throughout the novel. He is only reason why his mother accepts each setback and continues to live on. The 'optimistic colours of nappy packaging' and his playful gurgles add colour to a world slowly slipping into darkness.

'I can see people by the roadside, walking in groups. Like mass hitchhiking with no lifts. Some have children balanced on their shoulders. Some are limping.'

During these early days of parenthood, the world's oceans inexplicably and quickly begin to rise at an unprecedented level. The author portrays this flood as a biblical reckoning. Passages from Genesis are sprinkled amongst the text to provide a context and backdrop to the events.

As homes are destroyed and communications disrupted, eventually 'the cupboards reveal themselves more by the day: their wooden backs, the greying corners we never used to see.' Family members are sent to scavenge for food and never return. Violence erupts. Refugee camps are established. While the world closes around our characters, more and more Z and his mother take centre stage.

'We are told not to panic, the most panic-inducing instruction known to man.'
Less is definitely more when it comes to considering The End We Start From. Hunter superbly uses this approach to great effect. It allows the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps carefully placed by the author. It builds a prolonged tension that I have not enjoyed since I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But best of all, it ensures that everyone will walk away from this novel with a different reading experience. From a debut novelist, these are fantastic attributes to have attached to your first novel. What a read. I look forward to future works from this talented author.

'Then we say the secret: there is no skill. There is only another person, smaller than you'
Would I recommend this book to a friend?

Yes, yes, yes! Because of its short length and high quality, this book is ideal for reading, passing on and discussing with your bookworm friends. Very few books can be read in such a short time yet leave such a long lasting impression. The End We Start From is an instant classic.

When I started reading this book I didn't know what to expect. I quickly got into it and ended up reading it in one sitting. The situation the leading character finds herself in is one that you imagine you'd never find yourself in however is much more realisic than a zombie apocalypse so it really makes you think.
I enjoyed reading this and to be honest wanted to find out so much more by the end!
A beautifully written book which is an easy word yet thought provoking.

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for sending me a copy.

It feels fortuitous that I picked a remote location to read Megan Hunter's extraordinary debut novel “The End We Start From.” Over the long Easter weekend I stayed at the Living Architecture property A House for Essex designed by Grayson Perry. This is a remote building filled with art and surrounded by fields of yellow rapeseed plants alongside the coast; it’d make an ideal spot to be holed up in if an apocalypse were ever to happen like it does in Hunter’s book. In this brief powerful novel London is flooded at the same time its narrator gives birth to her first child. She and her husband flee to stay with his parents on higher ground, but society quickly unravels in a nightmarish way. However, for the narrator life has just begun as she discovers the reality of motherhood caring for her baby son named Z. The novel gives an extraordinary sense of the way life alters both internally and externally as she struggles to survive.

The characters in this novel are known only by their initials which adds to the creepy sense of anonymity – as if without the language and structure of society people become nothing but faceless groups to be shepherded into temporary camps. Not only do these refugees from the devastated capital become faceless to the government, but friends, family and lovers become estranged and lose each other. The initials also give a sense of how insulated the narrator’s life becomes as her whole world becomes about this child while the civilization around her swiftly collapses. People go missing. Food becomes scarce. Rogue groups seek out isolated havens. Her life is concentrated solely on keeping her new son alive and nurturing him through this crisis.

This is a short book and tumultuous changes taking place over a long period of time are conveyed in brief passages. It’s commendable the way Hunter uses language so sparely with just enough detail to spark the reader’s imagination; a few lines are all it takes to convey a horribly tense dynamic surrounding the central character and her baby. The prose are so stripped down they almost turn poetic. Passages about the world’s end taken from different religious texts are interspersed throughout the narrative. This gives a curious sense of timelessness to the catastrophic proceedings and the feeling of cyclical change. It conveys a sense how the world is always coming to the end, but it’s also rejuvenated through change and new life.

Apocalyptic stories are common fodder for fiction as a way of exploring the unease we feel about the future of our society. Emily St. John Mandel did this so powerfully in her novel “Station Eleven” which (among other things) contemplates the way culture might morph and persist even after a devastating global illness. In “The End We Start From” Hunter flips a refugee crisis on its head so it’s the citizens of a wealthy world city that must flee for the hills seeking shelter. But it doesn’t do this in a polemical way. Rather it strips life down to philosophically enquire what makes us who we are when the people in our lives and place we live in are swept away. At one point she remarks how “Home is another word that has lost itself. I try to make it into something, to wrap its sounds around a shape. All I get is the opening of my mouth and its closing, the way my lips press together at the end. Home.” The story asks us to consider how resilient we would be if forced into an uncertain peripatetic life, but also how strong our sense of self is when transitioning between being a wife and mother, a husband and father or being a citizen and nomad. These are weighty and pertinent things to think about with such uncertain times ahead for all of us.