The End We Start From

September 4, 2017
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.

September 15, 2017

London is under water. People are fleeing the city in panic. An unnamed narrator escapes with her husband and new baby to the family farm, where they survive for a brief time before supplies run out. Then, along with many others, they leave their safe surroundings for the uncertainty of life on the road, eventually ending up in a communal encampment. When the camp also becomes uninhabitable, they continue northward from one shelter to another, until the husband goes off in search of provisions and doesn't return. The wife then links up with another young mother whose husband has disappeared, allowing each of them to help the other with child care and other necessary chores. Amid the chaos, they are able to see their young children grow and flourish just as they might have done in better circumstances. VERDICT 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. [See Prepub Alert, 5/22/17.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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September 1, 2017
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.

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September 15, 2017
Hunter's debut novel is the spare narration of a woman's first year with her baby, called Za 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)