The End We Start From

This is another book I came to via teaching; looking for new ecofictions, I put out a call on twitter and this title kept being mentioned by people I trust. When I read it, I was blown away by Hunter’s slim, powerful novel.

With the South of England underwater, Britons are forced to flee north to displacement camps, suddenly finding themselves fighting in supermarkets for supplies and walking the roads with their children.

I first read it for its depiction of eco-catastrophe and refugee crisis and its fascinating echoes of the fuel and food shortages of the pandemic. But as… show more.

Megan Hunter’s debut novel is a strange and poetic journey through the apocalypse. The story begins with a young mother giving birth during a cataclysmic flood, and the story recalls flood mythologies and the idea of water as both a source of creation and destruction. In our conversation at Propeller Magazine, Hunter shared other tales that informed The End We Start From and alluded to pregnancy, such as the myth often referred to as The Earth Diver, in which the world grows from a bit of material in primordial waters. The novel’s lyrical prose also gave me permission to… show more.