The Age of Miracles - Softcover

Thompson Walker, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1471124851 ISBN 13: 9781471124853

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's UK, 2015

Synopsis

'A luminous, magical coming-of-age novel'Marie Claire

'Maybe everything that had happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It's possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.'

One Saturday morning the world wakes to discover that the rotation of the earth has begun to slow. As birds fall from the sky and days grow longer, people start to flee - but there is nowhere on earth to escape to.

Julia is already coping with the disasters of everyday life. And then there's Seth: tall and quiet and always on his own; the skateboarding boy who knows all about disaster. As the world faces a catastrophe, Julia and Seth are facing their very own unknown.

About this title

Product Description:

Age of Miracles

Review:

Advance praise for "The Age of Miracles ""[A] gripping debut . . . Thompson's Julia is the perfect narrator. . . . While the apocalypse looms large--has in fact already arrived--the narrative remains fiercely grounded in the surreal and horrifying day-to-day and the personal decisions that persist even though no one knows what to do. A triumph of vision, language, and terrifying momentum, the story also feels eerily plausible, as if the problems we've been worrying about all along pale in comparison to what might actually bring our end."--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review) "In Walker's stunning debut, a young California girl coming of age in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers ... She goes through the trials and joys of first love. She begins to see cracks in her parents' marriage and must navigate the currents of loyalty and moral uncertainty. She faces sickness and death of loved ones. ... Julia's life is shaped by what happens in the larger world, but it is the only life she knows, and Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving."--"Kirkus Reviews" (starred review) "What a remarkable and beautifully wrought novel. In its depiction of a world at once utterly like and unlike our own, "The Age of Miracles" is so convincingly unsettling that it just might make you stockpile emergency supplies of batteries and bottled water. It also--thank goodness--provides great solace with its wisdom, its compassion, and the elegance of its storytelling."--Curtis Sittenfeld, author of "Prep" "'Miracles' indeed. Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel is a stunner from the first page--an end-of-the-world, coming-of-age tale of quiet majesty. I loved this novel and can't wait to see what this remarkable writer will do next."--Justin Cronin, author of "The Passage" "Is the end near? In Karen Thomps Advance praise for "The Age of Miracles ""Is the end near? In Karen Thompson Walker's beautiful and frightening debut, sunsets are becoming rarities, "real-timers" live in daylight colonies while mainstream America continues to operate on the moribund system of "Clock Time," and environmentalists rail against global dependence on crops that guzzle light. Against this apocalyptic backdrop, Walker sets the coming-of-age story of brave, bewildered Julia, who wonders at the "malleable rhythms" of the increasingly erratic adults around her. Like master fabulists Steven Millhauser and Kevin Brockmeier, Karen Thompson Walker takes a fantastic premise and makes it feel thrillingly real. In precise, poetic language, she floods the California suburbs with shadows and a doomsday glow, and in this altered light shows us amazing things about how one family responds to a stunningly imagined global crisis."--Karen Russell, author of "Swamplandia! " "This is what imagination is. I Advance praise for "The Age of Miracles""This is what imagination is. In "The Age of Miracles, " the earth's rotation slows, gravity alters, days are stretched out to fifty hours of sunlight. In the midst of this, a young girl falls in loves, sees things she shouldn't and suffers heartbreak of the most ordinary kind. Karen Thompson Walker has managed to combine fiction of the dystopian future with an incisive and powerful portrait of our personal present."--Amy Bloom, author of "Away" "Reading "The Age of Miracles" is like gazing into a sky of constellations and being mesmerized by the the strange yet familiar sensation of infinity. Beautifully written, the novel lets the readers see the world within us and the world without with an unforgettable freshness."--Yiyun Li, author of "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl" ""The Age of Miracles" spins its glowing magic through incredibly lucid and honest prose, giving equal care and dignity to the small spheres and the la Advance praise for "The Age of Miracles" ""The Age of Miracles" spins its glowing magic through incredibly lucid and honest prose, giving equal care and dignity to the small spheres and the large. It is at once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy."--Aimee Bender, author of "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" "Gripping from first page to last, "The Age of Miracles" is itself a small, perfectly formed miracle: Written with the cadence and pitch of poetry, this gem of a novel is a wrenching and all-too-believable parable for our times, and one of the most original coming-of-age stories I have ever read. Karen Thompson Walker is the real deal."--Dani Shapiro, author of "Devotion"

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's UK
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1471124851
• ISBN 13: 9781471124853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384