This book is written in spare, stark prose that underlines the desperate situation that a London couple faces with the birth of their child into a post-apocalyptic world. As refugees, they must struggle for everything, with their baby coming into a much different world than they are used to. Touching and mesmerizing.

First of all, if you love Dicken's novels because of how wordy they are this book is not for you. The prose is minimalist; allowing the reader to fill in most of the gaps. However, it still does not answer all the questions that I have. This made me wonder whether or not I liked the novella, as the sparse prose allows one to focus on just the narrator and her small world. 

On the flip side, I love world building. I love to know what makes the world tick. From the small world-building that I could glean from the prose, it seems that it took place in a present-day England as there are phones and televisions and modern medicine. The best way to describe it is a mash-up of Black Mirror and The Road by Cormack McCarthy. There is no explanation as to why the flood is occurring. It could be due to a natural disaster or from the small quotes that were sprinkled throughout the text it could be a sort of biblical flood. This latter idea does not hold much water considering that the book does not seem religious, to begin with.

Another point of the world-building that I did not care for was their names or the lack of. I know that names are used in the society because after Z is born the narrator and her husband go through which names they think would fit the best. After they pick a "name" the child is only referred to as Z and everyone else is referred to by a letter as well. This is annoying because I, at some points, forgot who was who and having actual names would have helped. However, this also goes with the minimalist aspect of the book so I am willing to overlook it. 

For the synopsis, I don't want to spoil anything but I like how it came full circle and the title makes so much more sense now. 

Overall, I did enjoy this novella but I don't know if I would read it again. I loved how short it was; I read it under 2 hours. It was also very peaceful to read, which is nice when you are a stressed-out college student. I encourage you, dear reader, to pick it up and see if it suits, maybe you will find a new favorite.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic/Grove Press for the ARC of this book, provided in exchange for my honest review.

I read this book in an hour and a half sitting, it's that short, but that's not really a compliment. While reading it, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn't reading a novel but a draft, or not even that. An outline. That's what reading this felt like. I was reading an unfinished outline.

The premise of the book, a strange post-apocalyptic London, caught my eye and made me push the request button. The atmosphere is what this book does best, you can definitely sense the despair and anguish. However, it's just a quick feeling, it doesn't linger because the moment you're starting to feel something, say when the mother-in-law of the protagonist disappears, the storytelling yanks you out of there and on to the next thing, without a chance to truly absorb what happened.

Megan Hunter can certainly turn a beautiful phrase, but I wish she'd developed her story more. I just couldn't get into it, feel for the characters, or anything else. Giving the characters only letters for names didn't help me connect. It was like reading a cold case report.

I truly wanted to like this book, it is certainly innovative, but in the end, it felt gimmicky and the gimmick did not pay off with this reader.

This was an incredibly uncomfortable yet beautiful read. The entire book feels like poetry in its exquisite sparseness and stark description. There is a plot, but despite the dystopian setting and dramatic premise, it feels more like a journey of the mind -the point here is not the plot. We are in London and the story opens with a great flood that is beginning to cover the Earth. The couple at the beginning have just given birth to their first child and the story takes off from there. Hunter's exploration of humanity, and what makes us human when stripped of all "things" and societal constructs is incredibly thought-provoking, and lingers long after finishing this short 160 pages. The emotional challenges that these characters face in the face of an apparent apocalypse are raw, touching, and surprisingly relatable. Pick this one up for a quiet day when you can sit, read, and digest it all in one sitting.

When I finished this short, thought provoking novel, which I read in almost one sitting, my reaction on the one hand was that this could be seen as a bold debut or on the other as an overly ambitious one. There is no dialogue, the characters are nameless except for an initial, and the structure of the book is different than most novels. I lean toward the bold even with a reservation about nameless characters.

Some catastrophic event is occurring. Though we never are told specifically, the devastating floods leaving London under water and surrounding areas in danger, there was for me an innate understanding that it was brought out by mankind, by perhaps a lack of acknowledgement of the causes of climate change. Our narrator gives birth at the beginning of the story and immediately I felt the hope and beauty of this set against what was happening. The imminent danger of the water, the food shortages, and the instinct for survival, for themselves and the new baby Z , is the impetus for moving north to her husband R's family. It is here that the direness of the circumstances which up until this point seem removed, hit home . The world around them is flooding and society has fallen apart. People are lost to "the disturbances" looking for food and to survive they must move from place to place , shelters and camps . Yet in spite of it all, a new born baby thrives, a woman moves through the beginnings of her journey of motherhood.

Right from the beginning I didn't like the use of initials instead of names . Maybe this is a way of making them appear as everyone, anywhere , but for me it removed a level of the connection I want to have with characters in the book I'm reading. Having said that, I loved the structure, short chapters with short paragraphs interspersed with biblical quotes and some lovely lyrical lines from other places. There are beautiful passages of a new mother's awareness of the baby she holds in her arms. Eerie and haunting, a little hopeful, this is a warning call in what could happen. Im looking forward to what Megan Hunter will do next.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Grove Atlantic through NetGalley.

I really liked this book and how it follows the birth and development of the child, Z, in relationship to the hardships and ultimate survival of the family. I really wanted more. The prose was beautiful and painful at times, and the relationships, though brief, were well developed. I just would have liked to know what really happened to R and what happened on the Island.

An extremely short and fast read, the narration is blunt but managed to leave me wanting for more. The writing style reminds me of the running notes we all tend to make in our personal diaries/journal. For starters, the characters have names that have been reduced to the first alphabet. So we have character names as R, Z, C, H etc. The book isn’t detailed but metaphors have been used to covey the severity of the situation. The tiny details one notices, the hope we all cling to for survival has been penned down to perfection.

Sometimes its difficult to catch hold of the events/thoughts the author is trying to convey but those are rare. Its an emotional and touching ride through the hardships the family had to face. Not just one family, but all those homeless people trying to survive and give a better life to their kids.

The protagonist is a woman who stays quiet, notices almost everything and clings to her newborn for survival. Her days pass noticing all the tiny changes that the baby undergoes as time passes. She loses her family during this process of evacuation but stays quiet and never asks why/how. Even when she does, she is denied answers.

The End We Start From has left me agitated and terrified with those subtle sentences and metaphors that carry the dead weight of destruction and loss. The book is full of promises and proves that hope is the only constant companion in the catastrophic dystopian world the author created for all of us.

This starts on a real high. Mother giving birth, father gone, London is flooding, the end has begun. Unfortunately there just isn't much to this. The people don't even have names, just initials. It's hard to tell what is happening in the world. After a while, it is hard to care too.

I did not like this book. Not at all. In fact, I felt myself having to force my way through the last half of the book, purely because I felt so apathetic to the entire thing. As a concept, this could have been a really interesting novel, but because it is condensed down into such a short number of pages, not to mention the fact that we are kept in suspense throughout about what this mysterious flooding is, we barely get anything from the text.

The characters aren't really characters because they're only given letters to their name and we can never establish who is where and doing what, mostly because there's so many different people. I just did not care about these people and their situation. This book needed to be longer, it needed to be more fleshed out, and it needed to not feel like the author was just trying to be super clever and poetic.

A very interesting and timely premise. The water levels are rising, London already under water, and it is spreading to cover different cities and towns. A young woman is about to give birth, and soon has baby Z. Fascinating juxtsposition, a pending breakdown of society, with the wonder of a new birth. They are forced to move, again and again from camp to camp, as the water rises, and as food supplies dwindle. Baby Z grows, and a mother's love for her child very apparent.

The story is told in short, sparse paragraphs, with quotes from the book of Genesis, creation and the flood, interspersed between certain segments. This was done so well, but there was one hurdle I could not overcome. The constant use of initials, bugged me to no end, and also made this short book confusing, trying to sort out and remember who was who. Possibly this was done to show that in a society collapse, an environmental disaster, names no longer matter, only survival does, but for me it lessened the impact of the story bring told.

I am not sorry I read this, it had important issues to convey, and many reviewers did not find the same impossibility of jumping through the hurdle that I could not. Judge for yourself.

The writing is spare and descriptive and in some ways beautiful; but the book didn't hold my attention and I didn't find it very enjoyable to read. I did, however, like the poetic writing enough to give it 3 stars

See, when I read this summary, I thought there would be more to it than what was mentioned. Something about the actual environmental situation or about the actual dangers of the new world. There is not. This is literally what the novel is about. To be fair, I don't even know if this should be considered a novel because it was so short. Not only was it short, it didn't have much substance. The story is told from the mother's perspective and she uses the alphabet to name everyone (there is a character named N, and another one named R). I really didn't like the whole alphabet naming thing because it always took me a minute to realize who she is talking about. I had absolutely no connection with any of the characters because you don't really know much about anyone except for the protagonist ... but there wasn't much to her, either. The struggles that she went through didn't really seem like struggles because they weren't described very well. And while I like babies, I don't like reading about their normal development. Barely anything happens in this book and the only reason I got through this novel was because of how short it was. I'm giving this a 1/5 stars.

4.5 Stars

Megan Hunter's The End We Start From is a prose poem (yes, that's a thing) that tells the story of a near-apocalyptic flood submerging London during the last weeks of an unnamed woman's pregnancy. An older first-time mother (geriatric primigravida), the woman narrates the harrowing story of her delivery and shortly thereafter evacuates with her husband. Ultimately separated from her husband, she travels through several evacuation camps and is ultimately able to return home after the harrowing first year of her son "Z's" life. Hunter is an award-winning British poet and it shows in the elegiac tone of this novella, which takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding (Four Quartets). This is a beautiful 140-page novella. Those afraid of another story of dystopian horror should take comfort in the further lines from Eliot's opus:

"And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well"

The spare, poetic tone of this short book may not be for everyone, but it was a moving read for me.

The Music Shop is a hymn to vinyl, love
British almost to a fault and an ode to the eighties, Rachel Joyce’s The Music Shop spans decades of a record shop on a minor London street filled with similarly unprofitable stores and the lives of the heartbroken owner, a heartbroken young lady with a sad story, and the wildly diverse characters who swirl around them and the neighborhood like flotsam in unkempt gutters. Musical, lyrical, occasionally naughty, and cinematic, The Music Shop introduces me to her earlier release: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which I look forward to listening to, um, reading.

Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/

This was a... really weird book. As a result, I'm not sure what to rate it or how exactly to review it. But I'll give it a shot.

The best thing about this book was probably it's beautifully lyrical prose. Megan Hunter for sure knows how to write in a lyrical way. That's probably also her downfall because the book fell flat when it came to pretty much everything else. To me, it almost felt like Hunter was so into the prosaic quality of her book that she let everything else go, resulting in a book that I was intrigued by for the first quarter, and totally bored by after that.

For a science fiction novel (apparently), this novel... is very much not science fiction. Sure, it's a "dystopia" setting. But we actually know nothing about this dystopian setting. We hear some vague things about a possible war and some floods, but nothing about this is elaborated. There is basically zero world-building. On top of that, there is no sense of place. The book is set in the UK, and the narrator refers to London and Scotland multiple times. On top of that, she spends time at two different refugee camps. Yet, as a reader I never got a sense of place for any of these places, which is especially bad for dystopian fiction where a sense of place is pretty important, in my honest opinion.

I also just didn't connect to any of the characters. Which is unsurprising since none of the characters had names. The narrator was nameless and everyone she came across was only recognisable by, presumably, the first letter of their name. So the narrator's husband was R, and her baby was Z, on and on and on. If there were only two or three characters, maybe this wouldn't have been so annoying, but by the end of the book we were getting so many letters of the alphabet as characters that I was like "huh???" I also would have understood if the characters being nameless served some sort of a purpose besides being difficult and grating... but they really didn't.

The central focus of the book is really about the narrator and Z, her newborn baby. They have to navigate a newly-emerged "dystopian" world together. But... even that felt pretty lacking, if I'm perfectly honest. Everything is told in snippets that were often 400-500 words - if even. Leaving a lot to desire. Everything was so vague: plot, characters, relationships, the world. There was absolutely nothing to hold on to.

The good thing about this book was that it was so short I could read it in one sitting (and I still skimmed the last half of the book because I was bored to death). It's sad because Hunter is a good writer prosaically.

I would recommend this book to you if you are absolutely in love with prose to the point where you don't really care about anything else. Otherwise...

What a strange book. The writing is very sparse. At time, the book reads more like someone’s notes about a book than an actual story. And it's funny how the use of initials instead of names threw me for a loop.

In this book a woman gives birth to her firstborn just as a flood envelopes London. She and her husband escape to a mountain to live with his parents. But they are forced to keep moving and half the time the reasons are not filled in. People come, people go. It's like as the world ends, so does her ability to maintain a complete thought. Most of this book revolves around watching her baby grow and the normalcy of his development contrasted with how the outside world has changed.

I'm sure the choppy writing was meant to symbolize what was happening. But for me, it just irritated. It was all I could do to finish this and the only reason I did is that it's a very short book.

My thanks to netgalley and Picador for an advance copy of this book.

This is short book, so this review will also be a bit short. THE END WE START FROM is a lyrical masterpiece hidden behind a dystopian novel. I can’t even begin to to describe how I feel about this book. It is so good.

THE END WE START FROM is about a woman who gives birth right as her home, and most of London, is being submerged under water. She names her child Z, short for Zeb. Everyone else in this story is only known by a letter. The main character is never named and the details of her are more about how she is feeling or imagines she is seen by others, than what she actually looks like. The story follows the woman on this journey to find safety and security for her and her child. Along with the horror of being separated from her husband, being displaced and forced to live with strangers, there is the miracle of this baby Z that she loves so much.

The books starts with this:

“I am hours from giving birth, from the event I thought would never happen to me, and R has gone up a mountain.”

This story is more about motherhood than the event. It was so fascinating to read about this woman whose whole world has changed not just because of the event, but because of the Z, a child she thought she would never have. She’s older and has waited a long time to be a mother. Even still, motherhood changes a woman. Her story of discovery of her child, along with the miracle and struggles of newborns, was so familiar.

The prose in this book is sparse, and the author doesn’t waste a single word. For me the scenes were easy to imagine as the story flows from the woman’s perspective effortlessly. I almost want to compare this to THE HANDMAID’S TALE as it was vague but gave just enough details to tell a story. Of course, this story is more complete in my opinion as we see where the characters end up and it is much more linear.

The only thing I didn’t like was the brevity of the story. I did enjoy where the story left off but I would have read and enjoyed another 400 pages of a story like this, written in this way. I would to read more from this author and I highly recommend this book.

This brief novel is narrated by an unnamed woman as she, her husband, R, and their newborn son, Z, survive after a flood devastates London. Like the characters, much of the action of the novel remains unnamed, giving the reader space to fill. Trying to stay ahead of the damage, cut off and relying heavily on unofficial reports and gossip, the narrator also documents her life--the prosaic and the profound. Parallel to the recovery and rebirth of the city are Z's milestones: cutting teeth, rolling over, standing. Haunting and spare, Hunter challenges the reader with a nameless, faceless narrator who readers will nevertheless identify with and a lean narrative that will hold readers' attention.

Reviewed on Goodreads.

A short but poetically written book. Megan Hunter uses the everyday changes in a babies life to bring the story of this disaster to life. It's an unusual story but one I couldn't put down.

A poetic, dystopian-ish, postmodern novella. The physical connection between mother and child gives life and purpose to a world being torn apart.