3 Review(s)

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. It is never what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown...' 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. Reviews ''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 ‘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 About the Author Karen Thompson Walker is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. A former book editor, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings beforework. Born and raised in san Diego, California , she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.