The End We Start From

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 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 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 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 Extraordinary. Megan Hunter's prose is exquisite, her depiction of a world descending into chaos is frighteningly real, and yet, it is her portrayal of motherhood - that tender-terrifying experience of bringing a child into a world - that has remained with me. The End We Start From is an incredible, original exploration of all that beauty, boredom and bewilderment. 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 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 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 The Cove Exceptional, stunning. I devoured it -- Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching 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. -- Cathy Rentzenbrink * Stylist * 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 * Powerful . . . an uplifting celebration of the reality of motherhood in the face of terrifying global disaster * Daily Mail * 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 tim

Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and studied English Literature at Sussex and Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. The End We Start From, her first novel, has been translated into seven languages, was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize.