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.

For me this book does not match up to it's description. I was expecting the aftermath of a disaster, the flooding of London, and the survival efforts of one woman and her newly born child as they seek shelter. In reality, the woman seems to face small hardship as she is driven by her partner to a shelter, then onwards to a remote island courtesy of another friend. Within a few weeks she returns to London. There is no description of the devastation, just brief mentions of panic. We are not told why there is a threat from other people that forces them to move on, or why that threat suddenly disappears.
There is so much emphasis on childbirth and the obsession with her child that the disaster becomes incidental, like something happening in the background. This may be the writers intention, but this is not reflected in the books description, and that was why I chose to read this book so I was disappointed.
It is a short story, easy and quick to read that could do without the interruption of random quotes.

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.