The Age of Miracles
the most thought-provoking end-of-the-world coming-of-age book club novel you'll read this year
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- USD 6.99
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- USD 6.99
Publisher Description
'A stunner from the first page - an end-of-the-world, coming-of-age tale of quiet majesty. I loved this novel ' Justin Cronin, author of The Passage
WHAT IF our 24-hour day grew longer, first in minutes, then in hours until day becomes night and night becomes day?
What effect would this slowing have on the world? On the birds in the sky, the whales in the sea, the astronauts in space, and on an eleven-year-old girl, grappling with emotional changes in her own life...?
One morning, Julia and her parents wake up in their suburban home in California to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth is noticeably slowing. The enormity of this is almost beyond comprehension. And yet, even if the world is, in fact, coming to an end, as some assert, day-to-day life must go on. Julia, facing the loneliness and despair of an awkward adolescence, witnesses the impact of this phenomenon on the world, on the community, on her family and on herself.
'It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophies are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown…'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping debut, 11-year-old Julia wakes one day to the news that the earth's rotation has started slowing. The immediate effects no one at soccer practice; relentless broadcasts of the same bewildered scientists soon feel banal compared to what unfolds. "The slowing" is growing slower still, and soon both day and night are more than twice as long as they once were. When governments decide to stick to the 24-hour schedule (ignoring circadian rhythms), a subversive movement erupts, "real-timers" who disregard the clock and appear to be weathering the slowing better than clock-timers at first. Thompson's Julia is the perfect narrator. On the brink of adolescence, she's as concerned with buying her first bra as with the birds falling out of the sky. She wants to be popular as badly as she wants her world to remain familiar. 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.
