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WORK TITLE: The End We Start From
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BIRTHDATE: 1984
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LAST VOLUME:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/19/end-we-start-from-megan-hunter-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1984, in Manchester, England; children: two.
EDUCATION:Sussex University, B.A.; Jesus College, Cambridge, M.Phil.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist.
AWARDS:Novel of the Year award shortlist, Books Are My Bag Readers Awards, 2017, and Aspen Words Prize longist, both for The End We Start From; Bridwell Prize shortlist for poetry; Aesthetica Creative Writing finalist.
WRITINGS
The production companies SunnyMarch and Hera Pictures have secured the rights to The End We Start From.
SIDELIGHTS
Megan Hunter’s debut novel The End We Start From is set in a post-apocalyptic England after the city of London has been drowned in a flood. “Written in a poetry-prose hybrid that resembles fragments of a diary,” declared Liz Button in her introduction to an interview with the author found on the American Booksellers Association Website, “this modern-day parable opens with an unnamed woman giving birth to her first child, Z, as London is overtaken by catastrophic flooding.” “This new family flees London for the safety of R’s parents’ rural home, where they’re afforded a brief period of relative quiet,” said Lucy Scholes in the London Independent, “before food shortages and violence … see them forced further north, over the border into Scotland.” “The journey of mother and son in search of refuge from the rising water is punctuated by moments of humanity and kindness,” Button explained, “and Z thrives against all odds, even as civilization crumbles, the sea overtakes the land, and dangerous crowds clamor for basic supplies.” “Told in a voice that is by turns meditative, desperate, and hopeful,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “this novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.”
Hunter’s novel attracted attention for the way she views post-flood England: through the eyes of a new mother totally involved in caring for her infant child. “Prescient in its depiction of climate change-induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love,” opined a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Hunter’s tale gains impact from its plausibility.” The author “excels particularly,” wrote Annie Bostrom in a Booklist review, “in portraying both devastating calamity and the aspects of mothering that are unchanged by it.” “Since I was a child,” Hunter stated in an interview in Foyles, “I’ve been fascinated by disaster movies, by people being overwhelmed by natural forces, running from gigantic waves etc. As a culture we are increasingly obsessed by our own collective doom–understandably, in the face of climate change and nuclear weapons–and I wanted to situate this preoccupation in a larger time frame. I wanted to place different images and tones–modern and ancient–alongside each other, and see what atmospheres and insights this generated.” “From refuge to redemption, from retreat to recovery,” asserted Gerry Paige Smith in BookPage, “The End We Start From is an exquisite paean to how we come back from the times that challenge us all.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2017, Annis Bostrom, review of The End We Start From, p. 23.
Independent (London, England), May 24, 2017, Lucy Scholes, review of The End We Start From.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The End We Start From.
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of The End We Start From, p. 61.
ONLINE
American Booksellers Association Website, http://www.bookweb.org/ (October 17, 2017), Liz Button, “A Q&A with Megan Hunter, Author of November’s #1 Indie Next List Pick.”
BookPage, https://bookpage.com/ (November 7, 2017), Gerry Paige Smith, review of The End We Start From.
Foyles, http://www.foyles.co.uk/ (December 26, 2017), author interview.
Rogers, Coleridge and White Website, http://www.rcwlitagency.com/ (December 26, 2017), author profile.
Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, alongside her dystopian novel, The End We Start From.
Megan Hunter
Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story ‘Selfing’.
Megan’s first book, The End We Start From, is published by Picador (UK), Grove Atlantic (USA), Hamish Hamilton (Canada), Beck (Germany), Hollands Diep (Holland), Elsinore (Portugal), and is forthcoming from Gallimard (France), Guanda (Italy), Yapi Kredi (Turkey) and Vegueta Ediciones (Spain). Film rights have been acquired by Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company, SunnyMarch, and Hera Pictures. The End We Start From was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and is longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize.
Agent Name: Emma Paterson
Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story "Selfing." The End We Start From is her first book.
A Q&A With Megan Hunter, Author of November’s #1 Indie Next List Pick
By Liz Button on Tuesday, Oct 17, 2017
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Megan Hunter’s dystopic debut novel The End We Start From (Grove Press, November 7) is booksellers’ number-one pick for the November Indie Next List.
Written in a poetry-prose hybrid that resembles fragments of a diary, this modern-day parable opens with an unnamed woman giving birth to her first child, Z, as London is overtaken by catastrophic flooding. The journey of mother and son in search of refuge from the rising water is punctuated by moments of humanity and kindness, and Z thrives against all odds, even as civilization crumbles, the sea overtakes the land, and dangerous crowds clamor for basic supplies.
“Luminous and sparse, heartbreaking yet hopeful, The End We Start From is a lyrical rumination on environment, normalcy in the midst of crisis, new motherhood, unavoidable endings, and tentative beginnings,” said Rebecca Speas, a bookseller at One More Page Books in Arlington, Virginia. “A slim and stunning debut whose echoes will be thunderous.” The End We Start From was also an Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2017 selection.
Hunter lives in Cambridge, England, with her two young children. She has a bachelor of arts degree in English Literature from Sussex University and a masters of philosophy degree in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for her short story “Selfing.”
The End We Start From was pre-empted by publishers from around the world following the 2016 London Book Fair. It was published in the U.K. in May and film rights have been sold. Here, Hunter talks with Bookselling This Week about the book’s unique, stripped-down style, her book’s parallels to the recent hurricanes in the Americas, and the singular nature of a mother’s love.
Bookselling This Week: Where did the idea come from for this story?
MH: I was actually writing a longer novel about successive generations of women giving birth. This was going to be one of the generations of women who was giving birth slightly in the future, as I imagined her. The rest of the novel was of a fairly conventional style, but this part just seemed to have its own life and its own momentum. So it sort of emerged from some kind of idea of a larger work.
I’d been thinking about disaster for a while and reading novels about it, and thinking about motherhood, too, so it was just bringing those two things together, setting them side by side and thinking, “Well, what would happen if you just had a newborn baby…” and using the inherent drama of that. The novel begins and she’s literally hours from birth; there’s that whole kind of intrinsic drama of birth set alongside the extraordinary situation of this catastrophe. All the energy kind of comes from putting those two things together.
BTW: Some of the horrific scenes depicted in your book seem a bit too familiar, especially after parts of Houston, Florida, the Caribbean islands, and Puerto Rico were devastated by hurricanes in recent months. Have you been watching the news in the U.K. and thinking about the parallels?
MH: Yes, I’ve been seeing lots of reports and it’s horrific, really. I’ve been aware of catastrophic flooding in other parts of the world, in the U.K., as well as the flooding with Hurricane Katrina, and I’ve also been hearing reports about the refugee crisis. I don’t think I thought this through consciously before I wrote it, but I think what I was trying to do was process these things that I was hearing about in a very distant way but bringing them very, very close to home, and to imagine, what if that happened to somebody like me? A lot of it is about the emotional impact. The book is fairly light on detail, but what I was trying to imagine and to fictionalize was the emotional, existential impact of a disaster like that.
BTW: As you intimated, it’s not really explained in the book why the flood happens. Was climate change on your mind when you wrote the book?
MH: Yes, definitely. I’ve been concerned about climate change for most of my life, and I think when you have children you begin to think, I’m not going to be living until 2100 but my children may be. You start to think about that as a real thing; it’s not a distant possibility anymore. And this is all becoming more and more real with the extreme weather that’s been happening. That was one of the reasons why it was important to me that it was a flood because that is one of the main risks of climate change, with sea levels rising, so it’s become a very realistic possibility.
The other reason it was a flood is for the metaphorical weight of a flood and the link to the woman’s body — the waters of life, the amniotic fluid. The world floods and her water breaks at the same time so there is that link between the two events.
BTW: Phrases in italics are interspersed throughout the text that tell the story of Noah and the ark along with other stories that reference the earth’s creation. Were these actual passages from the Bible or are they your reinterpretations?
MH: They’re mainly adaptations. Some are from the Bible but most of them are adapted from the many diverse creation myths from around the world that come from lots of different countries and cultures, mainly from that mythological period prior to the Bible. But there is the odd passage from the Bible, and obviously there is the reference to the biblical flood.
It’s a very, very common story. An alternative title for the book at one point was The Earth Diver, which I found to be the most common creation myth around the world. It’s found in lots of very geographically separated countries: the myth of some kind of creature going down into the water and bringing back a scrap of material that then becomes the whole world.
BTW: One of the other ideas in the book is how people coexist during disasters, from changes in the dynamics of families to the creation of a mob mentality. In writing this book, did you also attempt to explore the way disaster affects human behavior?
MH: I think the whole book was me interrogating my sense of how we relate to each other when we’re in particularly extreme situations. I think the book has a very pessimistic view of mass groups of people, of crowds, and I suppose that reflects my sense of global inequality and global injustice but also the day-to-day callousness of people not taking care of each other at that public or communal level. But I’m not a hopeless person; I know there’s a huge amount of amazing kindness and heroism in the world and examples of people putting others before themselves. So I hope I’ve also shown some hopeful examples of people banding together when it’s not just for their own benefit.
There is also ultimately this relationship at the core of the book between mother and child. The mother in the book is very much putting the child’s life, in a sense, above her own, as you do. With that, I was just thinking about how when you have a child you have this incredible love for them; it operates on that one-to-one basis, but how does that translate into how we relate to the rest of the world, and how much further does that go? It’s something that I’ve thought about quite a lot when I had my children: that kind of overpowering, infinite love you have for one person.
BTW: Why did you decide to only use first initials when referring to the book’s characters?
MH: It just felt natural to me. I’ve kept a diary at points in my life and I’ve always referred to people by their initials. I would never write their full name; I wouldn’t need to because obviously I know what their name is. To me, it reflects the intimacy of the text. There’s also a sense of it being something like a fable or a parable whereby the people are kind of everywoman/everyman characters; so it’s that as well. I didn’t really find it a big deal when I wrote it, but I’m always asked about it now, so I know it’s quite prominent in the book for people.
BTW: Your title comes from a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also prefaces the book: “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.” How did you choose this quote?
MH: I was just kind of scribbling and playing around, drawing little covers; I think maybe I’d scribbled it down during the writing of the book, but I hadn’t actually considered it as a title. The idea of it as a title definitely came afterward — it really felt like a kind of gift. It’s so fitting because obviously there is this huge ending for her and there’s also an amazing start. The book has a kind of circular structure as well, which also fits the title.
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Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.
In her debut novel, The End We Start From, London is submerged below flood waters as a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees in an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening, but where love, life and hope still have their parts to play.
Below, in an exclusive interview for Foyles, we talked to Megan about placing the book in a very long-range context of human history, exploring precariousness in all its forms and using language to achieve both intimacy and distance.
Author photo © Alexander James
Questions & Answers
How did you decide on the unusual spare, poetic form of your novel? Did it start out this way or did it become what it is over time?
It started out this way, after years of trying other things. I was writing poems about motherhood, particularly about the physicality of the experience, stories about water, essays in diary-like snippets, and a novel about the births of successive generations of women. When I started The End We Start From the form seemed to be a meeting point of all these attempts. As I wrote certain rules, or aims, emerged; the book seemed to have its own imperatives, and I just needed to keep bringing the prose back in line with these. This sounds rather programmatic, but it felt quite instinctive, as though I was feeling my way in something that had its own logic. The image that comes to mind is of a thief picking a lock, waiting for the click.
It often felt important for the sentences to be unexpected in some way, to tell an engrossing story but also to draw attention to the language it was conveyed in, to the shape and rhythm of every line. My hope is that the spare form helps to give each word a particular weight and strangeness, as well as leaving space for readers to build their own relationships with the text.
How central was the editing process to achieve the economy of the final work? How conscious were you of having to strip and pare?
I treated each chapter as a discreet entity at draft stage, and would work over each one, weeding out anything that seemed to prevent the book from becoming what it wanted to be. I also did this as I worked, writing many lines that I just deleted immediately. But it wasn’t written as a longer work that was then pared back: it was always going to be very short. I knew immediately that it would have a certain scope, length-wise, and there was always a barrier in my mind that kept it at these limits. The formal editing process – once the book had been sold and I was working with my wonderful editors at Picador and Grove Atlantic – was actually mainly a process of extending, rather than stripping and paring. It was mostly a case of adding a little here and there – it was the most nerve-wracking part of it all for me, as I was terrified of adding too much!
Can you say something about the mythological and religious texts you’ve adapted for the book and which have the effect of universalizing what the characters are experiencing? Why were they important to you?
It was important to me to place the contemporary story in a very long-range context of human history, particularly in terms of our relationship to the natural world. Since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by disaster movies, by people being overwhelmed by natural forces, running from gigantic waves etc. As a culture we are increasingly obsessed by our own collective doom – understandably, in the face of climate change and nuclear weapons – and I wanted to situate this preoccupation in a larger time frame. I wanted to place different images and tones – modern and ancient – alongside each other, and see what atmospheres and insights this generated. There is a wealth of mythological and religious texture that lies behind a lot of our reflections on our place on the planet, but much of the time this doesn’t enter the contemporary imagination. So I wanted to place within the novel traces of the ancient roots of our current anxieties, a broader temporal framework to house this very present-moment, present tense narrative.
Why did you choose to use initials rather than full names?
I did this instinctively, but looking back it seems that the initials give the text dimensions of both intimacy and distance that are crucial. There is a sense that the narrator is writing to herself, and in this way there is no need for her to use full names for people – it is a form of shorthand. But my aim, of course, is for the reader to inhabit this same space – to see the characters as the narrator does, as people so real that they transcend their names. The people are in this sense very specific – beloved – but also non-specific, ‘every people’ who could be the reader’s son, or husband, or friend. In this non-specificity they are like characters in a myth or parable or fairy tale. But there is the other side too: in the way the narrator describes them I hope they are fully present, particularly in the case of the baby, Z. I suppose the closest thing I could compare this contrast to is people in dreams; they are both intimately experienced and at a distance: they are utterly themselves, and they could be anyone.
The narrator says, ‘Most past things are ridiculous now.’ Would it be healthier, do you think, or simply impossible to see the ridiculousness in our everyday present? How did writing about the future change your perception of your own present?
I think this is probably one of the main functions of literature, for me: to illuminate the ridiculousness that can otherwise go unnoticed. If something seems to be normal or socially acceptable, it can take time for people to trust their own judgement and intuition and voice their dissent (if ever). To take one relevant example, I see this to a degree in many of the discourses around parenting: so many things are now regarded as normal or desirable that years ago wouldn’t have been considered so. Some of these are probably helpful and encouraging, but I would venture that many of them are not. Many of them seem to drive people (often women) towards guilt and doubt, rather than confidence in their ability to care for their child.
Writing about a dystopian future definitely allowed me to strip everything back to the essentials: a woman and her baby, trying to form a relationship in the best way they can, in the face of change and danger. And, of course, that is what we are all doing anyway – trying to love each other despite our ultimate mortality.
Having a baby often feels like an upheaval and overturning of everything one previously knew. But here, it is Z that keeps those around him anchored: ‘There is only Z holding me to the earth.’ You dedicate the book to your mother and son. How did the experience of motherhood feed into the writing of the book?
For a long time, motherhood and literature seemed to be separate entities, and my experience of child rearing sometimes seemed at odds with my ambition as a writer. With this book, I wanted to bring the experience of having a baby right into the heart of a novel – not a peripheral event, but the main show, with the rest of the narrative shaped and anchored by this central experience. It felt like a powerful thing to bring motherhood, at a very corporeal, elemental level, into the core of my work, as though I was bringing these two spheres of my life together.
The dedication to my own mother reflects the fact that I wanted to write not only about motherhood, but also about babyhood: about the earliest experience of having a mother, which is (almost) universal. Everyone is a baby at some point, and the experience of forming a relationship with a primary carer is crucial to the formation of the mind. Considering this, I think it is remarkable how little of this early relationship is depicted in literature.
Z was conceived in safer times but how much of a leap of faith is any pregnancy? Were you conscious of making that same leap yourself?
I think pregnancy is a massive leap of faith, yes. There is a line in the book about pregnancy being ‘The great bravery’, and it’s amazing how much the body changes and shifts in this time: how the very landscape of the self is re-formed. In the book, this change is echoed in the world around the narrator in a very dramatic way, but we are all born in uncertain times.
Is it a blessing ‘how quickly the everyday fills up time again’? Is this what enables humans to continue even in the face of the most challenging, life-threatening circumstances? Are the British particularly ‘good’ at it, do you think?
In this part of the book there is a glimpse of the kind of utopian hopes that can emerge from disasters, and that form a strong part of our collective fantasy life now (going back to the land, house in the country, #vanlife etc). The narrator thinks that she has found a partial solution to the terrible situation - by withdrawing from it – but then discovers that she cannot fully withdraw, and also that daily life will always re-appear, wherever she goes. I always think of those Frank O’Hara lines: ‘the only thing to do is simply continue/is that simple/yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do’. With regard to Britishness, I’m not sure – there is a reference to making tea in a crisis, but I imagine that every culture has some version of this: ways to cope, things to hang onto.
The long-term inhabitants become refugees in their own country. Were you conscious of the irony of their having to inhabit makeshift camps, much like many refugees in some countries are having to do?
I wanted to imagine what it would be like for this to happen to someone in a familiar and nearby place, perhaps as a reaction against narratives about refugees that are couched in very abstract, distant terms. I also wanted to explore precariousness in all its forms: emotional, physical and existential. In the book, precariousness becomes all pervasive, and danger and home become synonymous: the threat of disaster can no longer be projected elsewhere. Suffering – on a large scale – is no longer something that happens to other people.
Do you feel we are on course for an environmental disaster of the scale you describe?
I fear so. Certainly people around the world are already being affected by flooding right now, and all the evidence points to this getting worse and worse, and to global sea-level rises which will threaten many coastal (and river-based) cities. The disaster in the book is deliberately vague, partly because I wanted to explore how any disaster of this nature could affect people’s sense of themselves and their relationship to their environment. It is difficult to conceive of threats to the planet far in the future, but babies being born now may well have to face serious, life-threatening consequences of climate change. That ‘fleshes out’ (literally) the reality of the situation: centres it on a real, living and breathing human life.
Can you say anything about other projects you have on the go or are planning?
I have found that talking (or writing) about current projects can threaten their continued survival! But I can say that I am currently working on some new sentences, which will hopefully become new short stories, and a new novel.
Hunter, Megan: THE END WE START FROM
(Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Hunter, Megan THE END WE START FROM Grove (Adult Fiction) $22.00 11, 7 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2689-4
A haunting take on modern disaster, this contemporary fable fuses the epic and the intimate, the semicollapse of society alongside the birth of a child.Hunter's debut begins with an unnamed narrator in labor with her first baby at an apartment in London. The crisis at hand is ominous and ill-defined: floodwaters, devastating enough to render large swaths of the city uninhabitable, force mass evacuations. Our narrator, her husband, R, and their newborn son, Z, head north. Characters are known by only their first initial, a stylistic choice that's in line with the novel's spare prose but reads like a gimmick after a while. The new family must adjust and adapt again and again as they journey ever northward, first to R's parents' house in the country, then to a series of government-sponsored refugee camps. Hunter is a poet, and the novel is slim enough to be consumed in a single sitting: short paragraphs and frequent line breaks set off the narrator's thoughts in declarative stanzas, like aphorisms: "I have read that, when someone knows they are going to die, the world becomes acutely itself." Occasional italicized passages, which are separate from but complement the main narrative, allude to the book of Genesis, namely the Creation story and the Great Flood. "A dove was sent to see if the water had left the face of the land, but she found no place for her foot." Parents, especially, will recognize the familial exchanges of domestic life, like the transfer of milk from mother to child, rendered as equally consequential to the loss of home. In this new world, the line between the mundane tasks of everyday life and the struggle to survive ceases to exist. Prescient in its depiction of climate change-induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love, Hunter's tale gains impact from its plausibility.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hunter, Megan: THE END WE START FROM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a6d5b725. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192374
The End We Start From
Annis Bostrom
114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The End We Start From.
By Megan Hunter.
Nov. 2017. 160p. Grove, $22 (9780802126894); e-book (9780802189066).
Hunter's debut novel is the spare narration of a woman's first year with her baby, called Z--a bizarre and disorienting experience made far more so by the massive flood that forces them from their home in London. The narrator, who is unnamed, and her husband, R, first seek refuge with R's parents, until tragedy pushes them further afield to a shelter that's overflowing with the many displaced others. When R leaves, to hopefully find some other solution for them, the narrator finds community in a group of mothers and their young children while she wonders if she'll ever see R again. Through the narrator's restrained, episodic, and suspenseful recounting, Hunter excels particularly in portraying both devastating calamity and the aspects of mothering that are unchanged by it. Peekaboo entertains Z to no end; when he grasps an object for the first time, it is a triumph, and when he tries to roll over, "It looks like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands. Impossible." A uniquely intimate tale of motherhood amid catastrophe.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annis. "The End We Start From." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359832/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bc1393de. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507359832
The End We Start From
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The End We Start From
Megan Hunter. Grove, $22 (160p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2689-4
The postapocalyptic literary novel is currently in vogue almost to the point of redundancy, but Hunter's slim yet sharp debut offers a level of precision and interiority rarely seen in the genre. The novel opens with an unnamed narrator giving birth to her first child, known only as Z, just as a mysterious and devastating flood overtakes London. But rather than focus on the specifics of the catastrophe, the story instead becomes an investigation of the tumultuous internal life of a new mother. The scaffolding of the apocalypse narrative--hiding out from potential threats while also endlessly searching for supplies, trying to establish normalcy in the face of the unknown as sacrifices and forays into dangerous territory become increasingly necessary--serve more as a backdrop to the strangeness of a new human life. The narrator forges relationships with other survivors as she moves from place to place in search of safety and community, but the journey toward recognizing the world for what it has become is made all the more poignant as she begins to see it through the eyes of Z, a child who has never known it to be anything other than what it is now. Told in a voice that is by turns meditative, desperate, and hopeful, this novel showcases Hunter's considerable talents and range. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The End We Start From." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468039/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=837588ae. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468039
Web Exclusive – November 07, 2017
The End We Start From
Beauty and terror, motherhood and climate change
BookPage review by Gerry Paige Smith
In the midst of giving birth to her first baby, a London woman experiences a submergence of two kinds: the complete sensory inundation that follows childbirth, and the catastrophic flood of water that begins to drown her city and nation. She, her newborn and her husband join an exodus of humanity leaving the “Gulp zone” to seek higher ground and safer places. But the illusion of security and safety begins to crumble at each stop along their refugee journey. Family members disappear, allegiances with strangers form and dissolve, government fails, and the waters continue to rise.
With the sparest of prose, debut author Megan Hunter creates a riveting story told by a mother navigating a monumental catastrophe with the most fragile of life carried at her breast. The narrator’s scope of perception is honed to a narrow, singular focus on her child. From the smell of the baby’s ear to his latch on her breast, every aspect is defined with clarity. Her awareness expands to encompass allies, but lightly. The rest of the fumbling, drowning world encroaches only on the filmy edges of her sphere.
Building on our natural fear of the unknown, Hunter leaves unspoken much of what’s truly haunting in the tale—but the rising horrors of civilization’s breakdown are perceived nonetheless. Looting, murder, robbery and abandonment flow just beneath the surface of this spare volume. The observations that remain are beautiful, visceral and fluid. Amniotic waters, flooded streets, breast milk, tears, drool and oceans all flow in and out of the liquid prose within.
In the wake of recent weather crises and flooding around the globe, Hunter’s writing on the human impact of climate change charges this slim poetic work of fiction with powerful dystopian weight. From refuge to redemption, from retreat to recovery, The End We Start From is an exquisite paean to how we come back from the times that challenge us all.
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, book review: A strange and haunting novella-cum-prose poem
This debut novel has already been snapped up by by Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company SunnyMarch and Hera Pictures who want to make the film
Lucy Scholes
Wednesday 24 May 2017 13:45 BST
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Megan Hunter’s debut, The End We Start From, begins with a woman in labour growling like an “unpredictable animal” as her waters break, “the pool of myself spreading slowly past my toes”. Mother nature acting in solidarity, “unprecedented” floodwaters – the result of an unexplained environmental crisis – submerge the British capital: “London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children.”
It’s the end of life as the unnamed narrator and her partner, R, know it; but it’s also a beginning, of a new existence – one of survival – and life itself for their newborn baby boy, Z, a name that carries with it a sense of the last vestiges of the old world (echoes, perhaps, of Robert C O’Brien’s 1974 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel Z for Zachariah).
Hunter’s strange and haunting novella-cum-prose poem – it’s composed of short, staccato paragraphs of narrative interspersed with extracts from creation myths – charts the first year of Z’s life through his mother’s eyes. This new family flees London for the safety of R’s parents’ rural home, where they’re afforded a brief period of relative quiet before food shortages and violence – “disturbances”: “This is one of the words people use” – see them forced further north, over the border into Scotland. It’s a frightening world of checkpoints and refugee camps – “Shelter 26” becomes their makeshift home – yet it’s also oddly familiar, both to the narrator (“How easily we have got used to it all,” she declares, “as though we knew what was coming all along.”) and to the reader, all the dystopian fiction that’s come before filling in the ellipses in Hunter’s narrative.
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This isn’t a novel in which exposition is a problem; it’s more Virginia Woolf does cli-fi, impressions of a scene rather than detailed depiction – “After the flood, the fire. I am losing the story. I am forgetting” – something that’s both a stylistic decision on Hunter’s part, and indicative of her narrator’s survival mechanism in the face of such chaos. “Here are some of R’s words for what happened: tussle, squabble, slaughter” – we don’t need the description; images indelibly imprint themselves in our minds regardless. “I want to write about the checkpoint quickly. Get it over with,” she says later in the story, the troubling grammar and lack of sufficient spaces between the words in the lines that follow hiding a traumatic, best forgotten encounter.
I found myself picturing scenes from Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men while I read, Hunter’s narrative evoking a similar balance between the commonplace and the alien – of everyday life in a world that’s recognisably our own, but as seen through a glass darkly. Good news then that film rights have already been snapped up, by Benedict Cumberbatch’s production company SunnyMarch and Hera Pictures. Let’s just hope they do it justice; the dystopian elements are the easy sell, the beating heart of this tender and tremendous story is without doubt Hunter’s portrait of early motherhood, an all-encompassing world of its own.
'The End We Start From' by Megan Hunter is published by Picador, £9.99