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.

I received an e-arc of this earlier this year and it took me a while to start it. When I finally did, I wasn’t as wowed as I expected to be. The cover is undeniably beautiful but the content wasn’t to my liking. I was expecting a book centered more around a dystopian society or a world-shattering event. The book is narrated by a woman navigating her way through what appears to be society-altering flooding. It’s quite fragmented, taking place over a large period of time. Despite that, I really wouldn’t shelve this as science fiction or dystopian.

The book focuses a lot on the protagonist’s sense of new motherhood. The story meanders and there isn’t really a plot. This wasn’t my favourite read, but if you’re looking for something sparse and contemplative to read during the winter this may be for you.

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.

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.

I’m not normally into books that are this minimal, but after having seen The End We Start From on shelves for the past few months I couldn’t help but be intrigued.
I’m glad I picked it up, too. This is the kind of book that will be studied by English students in future years- simply because it’s so good and has so much room for interpretation. Megan Hunter writes in beautiful, sparse prose that puts you in mind of song lyrics, each word having been chosen with the utmost care to reveal as much or as little as she thinks you should know. The result is an experience where you have to think carefully about what you’re reading- and even revisit it a few times. It’s well worth doing so, though: not every book can make you feel so emotional by the end, but this one does it.
The story itself follows a young, unnamed woman just after the birth of her first child, Z, in the middle of an environmental crisis of some kind, that is only alluded to- and then only with words like ‘massacre’, ‘sunk’ or ‘underwater’. People vanish in a dreamlike way, their loss only really visible through the gaps in the writing- in fact, the whole story is written as though we’re seeing it through fog, with only the vague outlines of the characters’ lives visible. It’s a bit like a fragmented diary.
The main character’s story is all about her journey from the relative safety of life with her husband to a new life with her new child, at the end of the world- hence the ‘End We Start From’. We follow her from her husband, R’s, home in the country to life on the road, staying in refugee camps in Scotland and fleeing to an island to bring up her child.
Though I wasn’t really into Hunter’s method of naming her characters- substituting letters for names made things unnecessarily vague and has a touch of the teenage angst about it- she does a fantastic job bringing them  to life regardless, sometimes using just a word to describe her heroine’s mental state, and using her journey as a chance to muse on everything from love, to chances lost, to motherhood. It’s almost more like a piece of art than a book, but somehow by the end you’re so attached to these characters that I definitely got a little bit emotional.
Overall, this is a lovely book- one that can be devoured in one go, but rewards re-reading. Hunter has a beautiful, lyrical touch with words that makes these pages sing; if you’re looking for something different and profound then The End We Start From is for you.