"The End We Start From" is a dystopian novella narrated by a woman who gave birth to her first child amidst a catastrophe that caused London to completely flood, displacing all of its residents. I'm a big fan of this genre so I was predetermined to enjoy this short novel. I appreciate dystopian fiction that considers the unique vulnerability of women in a world after society and law and order have broken down. Hunter adds to that the challenges of being a new mother.

While I enjoyed it, the book is so brief that it lacks something. The sparse writing style appears intentional and, in a way, works well with the context of disaster and isolation. There's something about the writing and the brevity of the book that makes the story feel incomplete, however. I wanted to know more about the origins of the disaster and where the husband was and what he experienced during much of the story. It is enjoyable, unique, and worth reading, but not at the top of my list for books in the dystopian genre.

The first thing to say about The End We Start From is it’s not a standard book of fictional prose.

The story is told through beautifully-crafted sentences, isolated like islands on the page. Shots of consciousness, captured like polaroids. Each scene is built from just a handful of these, and there are two or three scenes per page. A flip through this slight book’s pages might suggest it’s poetry rather than prose, and each word feels suitably thoughtful and crafted. With its beautiful artwork too, it’s an exquisite object, filled with exquisite words. One to indulge in the hardback format, treasure, and re-read time and again.

Because The End We Start From works on many layers and takes its time to sink in; it’s a book to mull over, and learn from, rather than be swept away by. On the most immediate and personal level, it’s about new motherhood. It opens with the words: “I am hours from giving birth...” and charts, with wonderful intimacy and freshness, the experience of sharing your world with an entirely dependent human for the first time. But baby Z is born at a time of catastrophe and chaos: the second level in the book is the story of London submerged under rising waters and its citizens becoming refugees; of what happens to people when resources are suddenly limited and how to survive that. And scattered through all of this, is another layer of story again - creation and destruction myths drawn from myths and religions worldwide, dropped through the text in italics. These three layers sit alongside each other with equal resonance, sometimes throwing one another into contrast.

For me the most effective element by far was the portrayal of motherhood, I have rarely read anything so bracingly familiar. The narrator is so immersed in her experience as a new mother it completely overshadows the chaos around her. Cut off from everything and everyone familiar, and stripped of the modern accessories of parenthood - the lemon-painted nursery underwater and the “complicated Baby Play System...all its attachments floating free,” - she reverts to the fleshy and primal. Their relationship is one of nipple and skin and interdependency. She reflects: “I have started to think of myself as a bear, with my young clinging to my neck.”

But this strand is also packed with a knowing humor, from the throwaway - “I am a geriatric primigravida, but I don’t look it,” - to her description of labour, “Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline.”

Some aspects of parenting are different in this new world: sleeping through the night - because no one sleeps through the night anymore, some things the same: her guilt - when his very first roll rolls him right off the bed, “I am a terrible mother, I think, nestling his unbroken body into my own,” her fear - “The scenarios for his death are the most vivid day-dreams I have ever had.” It’s strangely validating to see the everyday obsessions of parenthood so beautifully written. And these quiet, private moments happen amidst /because of /despite the global chaos of the overriding story.

While the details of motherhood are magnified, the intense action of what is happening around her is muted, pushed into the background. What has actually happened is an unspoken question: climate change is unmentioned but ever present. Some facts are offered: waters have risen and much of London is swallowed - “A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast,” - people flee, they fight for food, for survival. The world is chaos, but the drama of the book is presented through the narrator's detachment, there is no dialogue, and even when she’s obviously not emotionally detached, she is instead resigned to the inevitable horror, “And yes I scream and hold their clothes and tell them not to go. And yes they go.”

This distance is enhanced by the naming of characters by their initial, rather than name. Her partner is R, her friend, O. But stripped of names these characters’ stories are freed to become universal, their reactions are the inevitable reactions to this dystopian future. The astute details of the motherhood observations serve this purpose too; they are universal in their precision, while the wider story becomes universal in its distance. And so The End We Start From fast becomes a parable, a tale of what might happen to us, a warning. Like the third layer of myths running through the book in italics, we’re left to question how this very familiar world could so easily slip into a new destruction myth.

The End We Start From is a difficult novella to review. The premise is intriguing, as is the writing. However, these are also what lets the book down.
The book is written in the present tense from a first person POV. It is also very fragmented, with short sentences and short paragraphs. All of which makes it feel very urgent, and that’s something that works well for the setting (Britain in the midst of floods and fire and panic). At the same time it means the story lacks substance. There is no dialogue. All people are referred to by an initial only. I would have liked to find out more about the people, the situation, the journey. Despite the intimate writing, I felt I stayed outside the story.
The novella is also very very short. Not only does it not have that many pages (around 125 with actual writing) but each page has lot more white than actual letters on it. I read it in less than an hour. I’m glad I got this as an ARC because I’d have felt cheated if I’d paid money for it.
I feel this novella has a lot of potential but didn’t quite deliver. Yet it’s intriguing and it’s still at the back of my mind even though I finished it last night.

A young couple, the woman is pregnant, only a couple of weeks before the due day for her baby. London is threatened by a flood, people are being evacuated and the couple is affected by the environmental crisis, too. But then the relief, they can stay in their home. However, after the birth of Baby Z, they need to leave their home and move in with the husband’s parents. The crisis aggravates, first the grandmother, then the grandfather dies, they run out of food, then they have to leave and find shelter in a refugee camp. As they move from one place to the next, they are separated, not knowing if they will ever see each other again. Baby Z however, is discovering the world, making his first movements, first steps and saying his first words.

The novel is striking because of Megan Hunter’s rather plain style of writing. Short sentences coupled in short paragraphs. The characters do not have names, only the first letter of their Christian name is given. This equals the shortage by which they are increasingly affected and it intensifies the feeling of hardship and stress. You can feel the reduction to the very necessary in each sentence. The paratactic style keeps you informed, but you do not smoothly float through the novel. I have not often read novels in which the style equally thus perfectly the story. And Megan Hunter has a way of putting action into words which makes you stumble quite often, for instance: “The day they don’t come back from shopping is beautiful.” (Po. 88) How can you ever reduce such a major event in a character’s life in such a sentence ending with an optimistic and promising adjective like “beautiful”?

The young mother is in the centre of the novel. First, we meet her with the well-known fears which all primipara share. But her fears are quickly overshadowed by the crisis which threatens their lives and the deaths of her parents-in-law. It is interesting to see how the style of writing expresses her emotions rather than functions as means for a description of how she perceives her situation.

The opposing developments of, on the one hand, the environmental crisis and on the other the development of Baby Z is masterly designed by the author. The antithesis in the title also picks up this idea. The life they lead before is gone. Your position in your job and in society, your role or roles in life – everything is submerged and questioned, now, all of the survivors have to start anew. The way the characters cope with the situation is also interestingly and convincingly depicted: some can manage, they are true survivors, other try to break out and run away from the situation.

All in all, a short novel which is striking due to the style it is written in.

I was hoping for a dystopian novel in the vein of Station Eleven, so was disappointed to find that this short and sparely written book is actually mainly about motherhood. The story, and approach to a vision of the future, left me cold - I have seen lots of buzz and positivity around this book elsewhere, however, so I feel sure this is simply one of those cases where the book was not right for me.

A confusing novella - 2.5 stars

Reading the blurb, I was intrigued by the plot - a woman fleeing a catastrophic event with her newborn. Reading the novella, I was mostly confused by the plot and repelled by the hardships the protagonist endures, which are described sparingly and vaguely.

I didn't know what was happening for the most part - who was going where and why, where characters had disappeared to, what had actually prompted the apparent mass exodus of London, and why everyone was suddenly returning.

I'm also not sure what the author was trying to convey. Nevertheless the language is often beautiful, lyrical, and hypnotic. The protagonist speaks in a detached way, except when talking about her son.

I neither liked nor disliked the book. I wish it was padded out more because I think there is the beginning of a very good novel here.

This post-apocalyptic fiction sees a very-near-future version of Great Britain in a state of veritable panic due to the increasing sea water levels. A mother-to-be is living in terror of her uncertain future. A father-to-be is haunted by claustrophobia in a sinking world. A baby is about to be born, and knows nothing of the predicament he is arriving in to.

Each character was not named and, instead, only graced with an initial to divide them from other characters. This had a two-fold effect on me, as a reader. It made my affinity with the individual characters decrease, and yet heightened the sense of reality about the events taking place. A name denotes an individual, and by taking away the character's individuality away, it could be anyone this book was focusing on. It made their horror and fear my own. It also made them seem more two-dimensional and unreal, and it was hard to separate these two conflicting feelings.

The reasoning behind the events that occur is another of the many things withheld from the reader, along with the lack of character names. This made the book a dually sparse and easy, as well as an intricate and demanding, read.

The sparsity of the text is where the power of it stems. It is unique, in that respect. But this sparsity is also what distanced me from so much of the story. These conflicting feelings haunted both my overall enjoyment of the entire reading and my understanding of every aspect of the plot. It is also the reason for my middle-of-the-road rating, as I am utterly unaware on where my feelings on this should lay.

This slender novel was the subject of a bidding frenzy at the London Book Fair and my Twitter feed has been singing its praises for the past few months. I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy so I decided to see what all the commotion is about.

The story is set in the UK of the near future. An unprecedented environmental catastrophe occurs and much of London lies underwater. Chaos reigns - nobody was prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. The narrator is forced to flee her apartment with husband R and baby Z in order to escape the "Gulp Zone." They make it to the house of R's parent's in the country which is safe, but contains limited supplies. Food is scarce and people are desperate. This young family will have to battle against all odds to survive in an unforgiving, alien landscape.

Great, yet another dystopian tale, I hear you say. Well what sets this story apart is the writing style. It has quite a poetic lean and there are some striking turns of phrase, as Hunter imagines the fallout to such a crisis. The hungry survivors of the flood "have started to look like models, all visible angles." The silence in a deserted house is described as "a textured, grainy quiet, a thickness to to stumble through." The narrator awakes on another uncertain morning "still crusty-eyed and climbing out of dreams."

But not all of it works, and there were lines that baffled me. "The idea came as a miniaturized image, a crisp packet in the oven." Not quite sure what that one is about. And "the stacked supply in the cupboard that grew shorter every day, like a reverse child" just feels plain awkward to me.

It's all very vague and mysterious, and to be honest I would have appreciated a little more depth and detail. The whole story is only 160 pages long and it needs more meat on its bones. It works best when it explores the joys and fears of motherhood, and the innocence of a growing baby, oblivious to the turmoil unfurling around him. In patches, The End We Start From is a haunting, lyrical parable about climate change but I finished it underwhelmed and disillusioned about what might have been.

Spent a couple days thinking about this book. While I enjoyed the premise - following the process and the aftermath of a great flood from a new mother's point of view; the execution was confusing and disjointed. From replacing names with letters only and the almost diary like quality of the writing meant that I was confused and lost for most of the book. A story is there, it's just hidden by choppy writing and an inarticulate storyline.

A very different type of dystopian novel from any I have read before. With a focus on its main character's role as a mother, it brings a human edge to a pessimistic vision of the future. Very moving and lyrical – plus a quick and easy read.

An interesting short read that keeps you involved to the end.

This was a different read for me. I've been trying to broaden my horizons this year, and so far I'm incredibly glad I have!
This was a tense and powerful read. A touching but also eerie story which I couldn't put down.

Excellent story! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

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.

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.