”Miracles’ indeed. 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 became night and night became 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 a family and a young girl, who is already coping with the normal disasters of everyday life?
One seemingly ordinary Saturday morning in a California suburb, Julia and her parents wake to discover that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. No one knows why, no one knows how to deal with it. The enormity of this change is almost beyond comprehension.
Told through Julia’s eyes, this beautiful and original novel shows how easily life can fragment, within a family, within a community, and on a far wider plane when the rhythm of life as we know it is knocked so unexpectedly out of kilter. Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning debut.
REVIEWS
‘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 Sittenfield, author of American Wife
‘The Age of Miracles spins its glowing magic through incredibly lucid and honest prose, giving equal
care and dignity to 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 R&J Book Club 2011 choice, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“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 love, 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
‘Gripping from first page to last, 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
‘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 Californian 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
‘Reading The Age of Miracles is like gazing into a sky of constellations and being mesmerized by the strange yet familiar sensation of infinity. Beautifully written, the novel lets the reader see the world within us and the world without with an unforgettable freshness’
Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
‘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