THE END WE START FROM

Name: THE END WE START FROM
Author: Megan Hunter
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2689-4

by Megan Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

Prescient in its depiction of climate change–induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love,...

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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.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2689-4

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.