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! 
*****

The End We Start From
Megan Hunter
Grove Atlantic, November 2017
ISBN 978-0-8021-2689-4
Hardcover

From the publisher—

As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. The story traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.

It doesn’t happen often but, every once in a while, I encounter a book that just leaves me cold and this is one of them. On the surface, I should have loved it because it’s apocalyptic (one of my preferred subgenres) and follows the physical as well as mental/emotional journey of a young family trying to cope with a world gone sour. To my dismay, I couldn’t connect with this in any way.

Characters, worldbuilding and plot are the three main components of any work of fiction and there is an interesting plot here in that the protagonist and her husband and baby are forced to find a way to escape the floodwaters and the devastation that has crushed London and the English countryside. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no worldbuilding; we know the water has risen to submerge much of England but that’s all we know. What caused this? A meteor strike, global warming, some dastardly act of a mad scientist, an alien attack of some sort? It’s hard to really feel what the survivors have to deal with when we know so little.

Worst of all, the characters are close to being cardboard cutouts when no one even has a name, just an initial. To me, this is a writing style that is almost pretentious and, coupled with the first person present tense that I so dislike, well, I just didn’t care very much. I find this happens fairly frequently when I read what’s called “literary fiction”.

The one thing that helps to lift this above the abyss is the author’s attention to the bonds between mother and child and she does that extremely well. I think perhaps that was intended to be the core theme and the apocalyptic elements just got in the way. Certainly, a lot of readers and inhabitants of the publishing world have a much more favorable reaction and, although I didn’t care much for this story, I think Megan Hunter is an author to watch..

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, November 2017.

This is a unique take on the apocalypse genre. At first, I didn't know what to do with it. Told in small segments from a single, first person perspective, with bits of poetry or quotes sprinkled regularly in, I wasn't sure what I was reading. But the longer I read about the life of this first-time mother with her infant son, during some kind of catastrophic flood, the more engaged with the narrative I became.

This is what I came to realize: this isn't an apocalypse novel; this is a novel (almost novel in verse) about motherhood. How obsessive and full of love you become when you give birth, even to the point where you forget your spouse. The apocalypse is a backdrop, easily forgotten.

And I did like that aspect of it. I mean, I'm soon to be a mother, so reading about motherhood always sucks me in! But, at the same time, I needed more.

It's an interesting take on motherhood. It only took an hour to an hour and a half to read. I'd recommend it if this review sounds interesting, but I'd also say it's not a buy.

2.5/5

[Posted on Goodreads 10/26/2017]
[Posted on Amazon 11/12/2017]
[Posted on Blog 11/10/2017]

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a recommended debut dystopian novel.

An unnamed narrator is pregnant and gives birth to her first child, a son called Z. Simultaneously an apocalyptic flood hits London and the women is forced to leave her apartment with her husband, R, a few days after giving birth. They make it to the home of R's parents in the country, but have limited supplies there. Eventually they are forced to leave for a camp for displaced persons, hoping to find safe shelter and food. R ends up taking off for a "few weeks" but is essentially gone. Our narrator makes friends with other mothers of young children, O, and evens travels with her to find another place of safety.

This is a difficult novel to review. It is a dystopian, but we never exactly know the what and why's (global warming? a natural disaster?). What we have is a new mother, marveling at her son's development and surviving the disaster. What we don't have is information about, well, much of anything of significance beyond what the narrator mentions. While the novel is almost poetic in its descriptions and phrasing, Hunter left out an important part, a definitive plot and narrative for us to follow while appreciating the well written turns of a phrase. We have a light plot - a woman has given birth to a son and a disaster of great magnitude has happened - but no great substance and details in the body of the novel.

Now, I say novel, but, at 160 pages this is close to a novella. It is a very fast read. With the lyricism in what Hunter does write, I do wonder if it was a choice to pare the novel down to the bare bones, just as the character's names are reduced to an initial. Are we supposed to extrapolate the missing details and infer what happened? However, there are cases when her descriptive prose is overwrought and not conveying just the essential information. It's a quandary. This is Hunter's debut novel, however, so she is a writer to watch for future novels.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grove Atlantic via Netgalley.
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3.5 stars

In this, her debut novel, Megan Hunter sets the shock and joys of new motherhood against the backdrop of impending environmental disaster. London is under threat from apocalyptic floods while a woman gives birth to her son, Z. The family move from camp to camp in search of shelter and food, while baby Z grows, learns and flourishes under his new mother's loving wing.

This book is more a novella in length; a short, fragmentary telling of a fate or future that is as possible as it is frightening. The structure is unusual; it is set in short paragraphs and short, staccato sentences, with quotes from the book of Genesis interspersed throughout. It contains absolutely no dialogue and all characters are given just a single letter as their name. While this didn't deter me too much, I did find it hard to remember who each character was, especially when I left the book a while. This shouldn't cause a problem for some, especially if you read it in one sitting, which is entirely possible given its length.

This was a concise and interesting read about the absolute resilience of a mother's love in the face of adversity. With a dystopian tone and a brave new voice in Hunter, The End We Start From is a bold debut that will please many?

This dystopian novella is a quick read, but it packs quite a punch. The changing climate has raised ocean levels forcing those living in flooded London to search for higher ground. The story follows a woman and her baby as they move from safety to danger, as food and energy resources dwindle and as mob rule and riots develop. Names are reduced to single letters, Z, R,O as if the narrator has little time or paper to record more than the basic facts in her struggle to survive. Or maybe the initials symbolize anonymity. This kind of catastrophic event would impact everyone with no heed to race or economic standing. The author uses passages from the book of Genesis as harbingers of things to come.

It was interesting watching the mother adapt to this new and dangerous world while protecting and nurturing her young son. Her chronicle of his development runs parallel to the slow rebuild, post flood and fire, of the dystopian world which they now inhabit. I admit to wishing more time was spent on the impact to society of this new normal rather than all the focus on Z’s development.
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A lot is packed into these short sonnets. Some are lyrical, some are maybe too ambitious. Always the author comes back to Genesis, taunting the reader into wondering if climate change will one-day force us onto arks like the one built by Noah. Food for thought.

ARC received with thanks from NetGalley for review.

I like dystopian novels, but this one didn't make a big impression on me. I liked the little details of the novel that gave it personality: the unnamed woman; the people whose names are only a letter (and of course this made me wonder what would have happened if there were two or three people with the same letter name); the span of the novel from the birth of the child, Z, to the moment he takes his first steps; the lack of emotion throughout the novel - facts are presented, no details; to quote an excerpt in the novel, they left behind sadness and happiness.

It didn't read like a substantial novel - the plot was minimal, really. It read like an anonymous person's journal entries, as if the reader didn't need to know all the details. And I do want to know the details, actually - how did R's parents disappear? Where did he go when he went away? What was life like, really, in the shelters? All these gaps in the plot would make for a great discussion point, I am sure, but it's difficult for the reader to understand the characters better.

The novel has a poetical tone, but at some point it started to drag on. However, it's a short novel and it's a fast read. It's not a bad novel, it has it beautiful parts, but I wanted more from it plot-wise.

I received a free e-book copy of the novel from the publisher via Net Galley. All thoughts expressed here are my own.

I didn't notice on any descriptions for this book that it was intended to be a work of poetry but that is how I felt while I was reading it. This book absolutely relied heavily on mood, tone, and other abstract ideas- often present in poetry.
I didn't really care for the style it was written- short and choppy phrases. The author seemed to want to imply that things were happening but it didn't read well. The story didn't have a good flow. And it certainly lacked dialogue and character development.
Even though many of the events and characters in the book are very abstract, one clear element in the story is that we must make connections with other people if we want to succeed and put ourselves ahead. It was also unique that the story focused on a mother's bond with her child and how easily the baby's needs can be fulfilled, even in a global catastrophe.
I am giving the book 4 stars because I could tell how the characters were feeling even though the author didn't express it in words. I also enjoyed the ending of the book.
Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Press for a chance to read this book.

A woman gives birth in the midst of an epic flood. She and her partner flee to higher ground, but their reprieve is only temporary, as their family suffers horrific and violent losses. Hunter gorgeously captures the bliss, rinsing tiredness, and tunnel vision of new motherhood, as the woman's attention focuses, laser-like, on her infant son in the midst of the larger catastrophe. Will she and her child survive? Will anyone? I read this stunning debut in a single sitting,

Megan Hunter's debut novel, The End We Start From is set in and around London after water levels rise quickly and dramatically. It's dystopian, it's short and it's about one woman and her newborn baby trying to survive in a new world order.

There are good reasons why this book sparked a hotly contested auction among 5 publishers at the 2016 London Book Fair, and why Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company has now paid good money for the right to turn it into a film.

This book is more art than fiction - the language is truly exquisite. It's a little jarring - there are no names, only first initials (which reminded me at first of the Story of O , which has absolutely nothing in common with this book...).

Phrases are short and words are simple, but they add up to so much more. Like poetry.

It's a classic dystopia - there's nothing new in the story line, except that it's told through the lens of a new mother, and I wonder if that's the point? So much end-of-the-world stories are told from the point of view of soldiers and scientists who are trying to beat the threat. Alien invasions, meteors headed for earth, nuclear holocausts.

But what if you happened to be pregnant at the end of the world? What if the people who were supposed to be protecting and supporting you and your newborn disappeared or died, one by one?

Not surprisingly, given its abbreviated and poetic prose, this is an incredibly short book. I found this probably the most upsetting of anything about the book. It ended so abruptly and with no sense of the ending coming.

It did, however, suit the book well - trying to find any real sense of of time, emotion and pace in The End We Start From is like wading through thick treacle. And yet, wade through it impatiently, I did.

Flawlessly written in beautiful prose, the book is a quick read, only 134 pages of perfection!

In sparse, meditative prose, Megan Hunter recounts all the ways life continues after a catastrophe. We follow a family as floodwaters rise, and they are forced from their home into makeshift camps with their young son.

We see the son's developmental progress throughout this short novel. Despite the hardships, Z continues to thrive and learn as he grows. We are witness to his mother's feelings of inadequacy and amazement.

Although, short this novel packs an emotional punch.

This was a sitting type of book. I was intrigued by the beginning of this child's life corresponding to the end of life as she knows it for the MC. Beautifully written but hard to fully engage in because of how thin it is. I truly did not become fully invested in the story or characters but thought it was good still.

A dystopian novel that reads like an allegory of current day. You will fly through this short novel.