"I was moved, terrified, uplifted - sometimes all three at once." (Tracy Chevalier)
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.
The End We Start From is a beautifully spare, haunting meditation
on the persistence of life after catastrophe. I loved it.
*Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven*
A shot of distilled story . . . engrossing, compelling and finally
hopeful
*Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, winner of the 2017
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction*
Extraordinary . . . The End We Start From is reminiscent of Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road . . . Megan Hunter’s remarkable debut novel
feels like the other half of the story
*Financial Times*
Powerful . . . an uplifting celebration of the reality of
motherhood in the face of terrifying global disaster
*Daily Mail*
I'll be recommending this book for years to come. Utterly
brilliant, hugely important. Here's the thing: it's perfect.
*Nathan Filer, author of Costa Prize-winning The Shock of the
Fall*
A stunning tale of motherhood. Megan has crafted a striking and
frighteningly real story of a family fighting for survival that
will make everyone stop and think about what kind of planet we are
leaving behind for our children
*Benedict Cumberbatch*
A short, haunting story about the end of days, sparse, beautiful
and heroic
*Observer*
Extraordinary . . . a spare, futuristic fable about a brand-new
mother navigating a flooded world
*Vogue*
Virginia Woolf does cli-fi . . . tender and tremendous
*Independent*
Extraordinary . . . it is her portrayal of motherhood - that
tender-terrifying experience of bringing a child into a world -
that has remained with me. I read it in one sitting, and was deeply
moved.
*Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites and The Good
People*
The End We Start From is strange and powerful, and very apt for
these uncertain times. I was moved, terrified, uplifted – sometimes
all three at once. It takes skill to manage that, and Hunter has a
poet’s understanding of how to make each word count.
*Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring*
I can’t remember ever having read a novel quite as sparing or as
daring as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, or one that
delivers so mighty an impact from such delicate materials. It is a
moving, wistful and compelling debut.
*Jim Crace, author of Harvest*
An exceptional, alarming and beautiful book, which still echoes
months after I finished reading it. Megan Hunter is a writer of
unnerving power.
*Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing*
A dystopia that feels utterly convincing as our narrator gives
birth to her son in a London under threat of advancing flood
waters. She lives in the gulp zone so must head off into a familiar
territory that has become terrifying in search of shelter and
safety. This slender take on new motherhood has stayed with me –
not least in making me think about the UK as a place to flee from
rather than to, and to imagine Londoners turned refugees.
*Stylist*
Startling . . . beautiful and insightful. Everyone who reads this
will come away feeling renewed
*Elle Magazine*
Megan Hunter's slender, startling debut shimmers with light, even
as the novel heads into dark territory . . . tender and
profound
*Psychologies Book of the Month*
The End We Start From is so good and clever: a beautiful, timely
book about survival (both domestic and global) shot through with
hope and humanity
*Lisa Owens, author of Not Working*
Beautiful . . . Water isn't the thing here, love is. And how we
survive as the level of love rises
*Cynan Jones, author of The Dig and Cove*
Exceptional, stunning. I devoured it
*Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching*
The End We Start From is relentlessly, achingly personal. Hunter
reminds us that disasters are rarely experienced in panorama.
Instead, we live bone-deep inside our narrator. This book is
fierce, sorrowful, and spiked with moments of bright joy.
*Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You*
Spellbinding . . . a debut [that] packs a punch that belies its
brevity, with the author's background in poetry shining through . .
. The End We Start From is a slender novel, but more profoundly
moving than novels six times as long. It is perfectly balanced
between fear and wonder. The world around them may be falling apart
in the most extraordinary way, but ordinary life goes on and, as
Hunter makes us understand, what a beautiful life it is.
*The Bookseller*
I held my breath reading this beautiful and timely novel. With
precise yet lyrical language Megan Hunter gets to the centre of who
we are, where we are, and why it matters. The End We Start From is
a work of art
*Christie Watson, author of Tiny Sunbirds Far Away*
This debut is a story of a new mother and her baby who are turned
into refugees after a mysterious environmental crisis. The End We
Start From is a relevant story of our times which shrewdly ponders
the meaning of survival and humanity in desperate times
*Wales Arts Review*
In a future London, a mysterious environmental crisis is causing
flooding. On the day a woman gives birth to her first child, Z, her
home and the city is submerged, and she and her husband R are
forced to leave in search of safety. In a scant 127 pages, Megan
Hunter creates a powerful and painful story of love and endurance,
and of the experiences of being a mother and a refugee
*Stylist*
A haunting dystopian tale unlike any you’ve read before. In the
aftermath of an environmental disaster, London is submerged by
floodwater and the narrator, who remains unnamed, is forced to flee
with her newborn baby. Despite the world as they know it crumbling
around them, mother and son grow and thrive in this dangerous new
Britain, where they’ve been recast as refugees. Poetic, precise,
and surprisingly full of warmth, this is a beautiful story about
the first months of motherhood and the places where hope springs,
even in the darkest of times
*AnOther*
Brilliant . . . Hunter traces - with expert precision and such
lyricism - who we are when life is minimised . . . an echo of Jenny
Offill's Dept of Speculation . . . a visceral, poetic
confession
*Irish Times*
Fans of Station Eleven will love this.
*Red magazine*
The End We Start From is an effective, unusual and ambitious debut,
which keeps the reader pinned to the page
*Guardian*
Set in a post-apocalyptic Britain, Megan Hunter's debut is lyrical,
uplifting and unmissable
*Stylist*
Megan Hunter uses words sparingly. In her startlingly poetic debut,
The End We Start From, she even rations her letters. She calls her
characters R and Z and each paragraph is only a sentence or two
long. Hunter tangles the delight and disorientation of new
motherhood with scenes of societal collapse. As everything seems to
be ending, as London floods, a new life begins, hot and pink and
hungry. Hunter writes with delicacy and precision; her imagery is
pearlescent in places. It’s a sliver of a novel, but it
shimmers.
*Observer*
Natural disasters and climate-related catastrophes might make for a
compelling setting, but to really catch a reader's interest, you
need to have the personal touch. And this is a novel that takes
that principle down to its sparsest, simplest best, focusing on one
woman and her child through a year of turmoil . . . best read in
one sitting to fully absorb the haunting, brutal yet loving
atmosphere of the narrator's journey . . . does a great job of
capturing the intensity of early parenthood . . . a tale of
survival in extreme conditions
*SFX*
Hunter's spare, drumskin-tight prose zings off the page, and
ingenious descriptions abound . . . It may only consist of 127
pages of impressionistic, staccato sentences, but this is a book of
wide horizons and big ideas, and it's no surprise that Benedict
Cumberbatch's company have just acquired movie rights. For Hunter
the future looks very bright indeed.
*Scotland on Sunday*
A story of sheer catastrophe, peppered with endearing experiences
and milestones of new motherhood. The element which defines this
short piece of dystopian fiction is the unique, elegant writing
style . . . The End We Start From is beautiful, thought-provoking
and most of all, hauntingly believable. It is a tale of hope at a
time when the country truly needs it. A stunning debut.
*Manchester Evening News*
In this short, fragmentary novel, an environmental disaster plunges
England into chaos as one woman gives birth to her first baby . . .
Narrated by the mother, the prose is stripped right back, with
passages in italics referring to a variety of creation myths. This
economy of style empowers a narrative celebrating motherhood, which
is ambitious, original and disturbing — and took me back to those
raw early days of parenthood.
*Daily Mail*
Apocalypse and rebirth are central to Hunter’s story. Like Emily St
John Mandel’s luminous Station Eleven, or Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy, you read it with the conviction that this is
what it would be like . . . Hunter’s apocalypse is a tender one . .
. The End We Start From promises the possibility of life
afterwards.
*New Statesman*
Sparse and poetic . . . beautifully written
*Independent*
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 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
*Publishers Weekly*
Poetic and succinct . . . an etiological exercise for a
climate-changed world . . . The power of Hunter’s story is both in
its spare prose, which undulates and captures searing images as
poems might otherwise do, and in the connection of its future to
the past. Italicized bits of origin tales accompany forays into the
unknown, and meditations on what has been lost are heartrending in
their clarity and familiarity . . . Settings, from remote houses to
islands to refugee camps, are rendered with precision, and prove to
be a mixture of alien and familiar. Though the story is marked by
incredible loss, the hope beyond the devastation is worth holding
on for. Hunter’s is an uncommon disaster tale—lovely, intimate, and
foreboding
*Foreword*
The story may seem familiar—the dystopian nightmare, the mass
migration, food shortages, an uncertain future—but debut novelist
Hunter's spare prose and luminous writing give it a fresh
immediacy
*Library Journal (Starred review)*
The real strength of this wonderfully earthy novel is in its
sharpened lens on motherhood’s apocalyptic-feeling joys and
terrors, and how they can form an all-encompassing world
*Vogue*
In elegiac lines, Hunter tells a love story through the eyes of a
new mother, who witnesses the death of an old life and the start of
a new one . . . a perfect portrait of rebirth the final testament
that time, and life, do go on, despite our best efforts
*Elle Magazine*
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 . . . A uniquely intimate tale of motherhood amid
catastrophe
*Booklist*
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