the age of miracles by karen thompson walker

With its adolescent female narrator, the book is reminiscent of The Lovely Bones. The Age of Miracles feels like a safe investment, though: Walker's voice is fresh and assured, she has a great backstory (she wrote the novel in the mornings before heading to work as an editor at Simon & Schuster), and her idea and execution have good company among previous literary and commercial smashes. Walker's novel about the future held echoes of the past when the rights sold at auction for a seven-figure sum – an advance thought to be a relic of a bygone, pre-recession publishing era. As the planet enters a new age, Julia is coming of age, and for her the daily considerations of popularity, first crushes and training bras are as weighty as the health implications of an altered gravitational pull. The age of miracles, as narrated by an 11-year-old Californian named Julia, is middle school. Crops die.Īnd yet the age of miracles of the title refers only in part to this magical and macabre new world order. Baseballs don't fly properly and birds drop dead from the sky. … Go to work, spend money, leave your cash in the banks.' But little by little, everything changes. Some panic, others form a stiff-upper-lip resolve: 'We'd been asked by the government to carry on as usual. But what if that weren't the case? What if one day we kept on turning into hour 25 and beyond? In The Age of Miracles, debut novelist Karen Thompson Walker imagines a world in which the Earth's rotation slows and the days begin to lengthen, by minutes at first, then by many hours.

June 21 was the longest day of this year, though actually it took the same 24 hours as all the rest.

The age of miracles by karen thompson walker