End We Start From (Hunter) - Book Reviews

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