End We Start From (Hunter)

The End We Start From 
Megan Hunter, 2017
Grove/Atlantic
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802126894


Summary
A searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that’s familiar.

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.

The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book — a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Megan Hunter earned a BA in English literature from Sussex University and an MPhil in English literature from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize International Creative Writing Competition, and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story "Selfing. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A short, haunting story about the end of days, sparse, beautiful and heroic.
Evie Wyld - Observer (UK)


Startlingly poetic.… Hunter writes with delicacy and precision; her imagery is pearlescent in places. It’s a sliver of a novel, but it shimmers. (Best Debut Fiction)
Natasha Tripney - Guardian (UK)


Ambitious, original and disturbing. (Best Debuts)
Fanny Blake - Daily Mail (UK)


Motherhood is an immersive experience and Hunter is brilliant on the urgency of it.... Hunter traces — with expert precision and such lyricism—who we are when life is minimized. How we respond under pressure, when time is measured in terms of where the next meal will come from.… Formally, and by placing motherhood at the center of the narrative, there is an echo of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation... it is a highly interior story, in the hands of a narrator of great skill. As an exploration of motherhood, it’s a visceral, poetic confession. There is an extra resonance in reading The End We Start From in uncertain Brexit/Trump times — and who can say whether this is a worse dystopia than either of those? But there is a postdiluvian hope on these pages. There is meaning in community, in simple things, and in words and family. A world can be as small as three people, but it can contain multitudes.
Sinead Gleeson - Irish Times (UK)


[A] strange and haunting novella-cum-prose poem.… [O]ddly familiar, both to the narrator and to the reader, all the dystopian fiction that’s come before filling in the ellipses in Hunter’s narrative.… Virginia Woolf does cli-fi.… 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 recognizably our own, but as seen through a glass darkly.… [T]he beating heart of this tender and tremendous story is without doubt Hunter’s portrait of early motherhood, an all-encompassing world of its own.
Lucy Scholes - Independent (UK)


The End We Start From is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in that it shares the same narrative detachment, and the same precise poetry. It is of course told from the perspective of a mother, rather than a father, and is set in a world that is only beginning to fall into chaos.… Megan Hunter's remarkable debut novel feels like the other half of the story.
Financial Times (UK)


Extraordinary.… [A] spare, futuristic fable about a brand-new mother navigating a flooded world. While it’s written with poetic reticence, it paints an expansive and moving portrait of the struggles and celebrations that any new parent faces against a backdrop that feels at once like a distant nightmare and an all-too-probable consequence of climate change.
Chloe Schama - Vogue.com


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.
Cotton Codinha - Elle


A new take on the [dystopian] genre, this startling debut combines utter despair with the reality of family life.… Megan Hunter's prose is beautiful and insightful. Everyone who reads this will come away feeling renewed.
Sharmaine Lovegrove - Elle (UK)


Poetic and succinct, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From is an etiological exercise for a climate-changed world — a post-apocalyptic novel in which current human mistakes are followed forward to dismaying ends.… 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.
Michelle Anne Schingler - Forward Reviews


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.… [T]his novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.
Publishers Weekly


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.… [T]his novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.
Library Journal


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.… 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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The End We Start From … then take off on your own:

1. No one has a name in Megan Hunter's novel: neither the narrator/mother, her partner R and their child Z. R's parents are referred to as N and G. Why the initials and no names?

2. In what way is having a child, or motherhood, the central metaphor for the novel? How does Z's coming birth and infancy parallel the course of the flood? Is the point, perhaps, that becoming a parent feels like the end of the world? How could that be?

3. The narrator observes: "How easily we have got used to it all, as though we knew what was coming all along." What is she referring to — got used to what?

4. What do we know about the causes of the cataclysm? Or what do you surmise is the cause? Talk about the resulting devastation and collapse of British society — the traveling crowds on the road, food shortages, and refugee camps — the peril around every corner.

5. What prompts R to take off from the refugee camp, leaving the narrator on her own with the baby?

6. How would it be for you to raise a child in this less-than-Brave (i.e., "admirable") New World? Reading about Z's growth, we can contrast his normal development with the abnormal state of the world. Aside from protecting Z, what does the narrator hope to accomplish for her child? What skills will she pass on to him, or how will she enable him to live in this new world?

7. Some of the narrator's observations about motherhood and babies are very funny. Find some passages you find particularly humorous.

8. How do you react to Hunter's use of the italicized interludes, which seem to be based on various creation myths. Do they enrich the storyline? Do you find them lyrical and imaginatiive, or hollow and undeveloped, or perhaps just confusing? What is their purpose?

9. What was your experience reading The End We Start From? Reviewers have commented on the sparseness of Hunter's writing. Do you find it too sparse, wishing the prose had been more expansive? Or is the writing just brief enough to allow the story to come through? Why might the author have chosen to write in such an abbreviated style? Might she be alluding to the inadequacy of language to convey all that is happening in the world?

10. As a follow-up to Questions 9 and 2: Might Hunter's sparseness with language be another way to use motherhood as a metaphor for the altered world? Consider that a mother's bond to her child is primal, requiring few words. Nor do infants yet have the capacity for language to express their needs.

11. What does the book's title, "The End We Start From" mean?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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