The End We Start From: the beginning

In creation mythology, one of the most common narratives is that of the earth- diver, in which an animal plunges into the primordial waters to bring up some small scrap of material. It is this piece that the earth is generated from: everything we know comes from something tiny.

Each novel has its own creation myths, fictional moons which orbit the central world of its narrative. These are the stories of a book’s beginnings, explanations that come after the moment of creation. But when we ask how or why a book was written, we must know that the whole answer is as mysterious as a planet, a place with its own atmosphere and potential for life. All we can hope to offer in reply is some scrap of truth, a grain of reality from which to begin.

One story I can tell: when I had my first child and brought him home from the hospital, there was a moment when the world seemed to dissolve and re-form again. The magnitude of what I had done seemed to rush through the streets, a flood of newness. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The way I remember it, someone brought me a newspaper in those first few days, and its front page warned of the possibility of catastrophic temperature rises by 2050, when my son would just have reached middle age. I had for years been haunted by visions of the end of the world, and now this was matched by a concern for the breath of a single human being. Is he still breathing? I would ask my husband. He was a quiet sleeper, and it was sometimes hard to tell.

Six years later, my own children were no longer babies, but around me they kept appearing: new life wrapped in blankets, miniature forms that I would hold in my arms nervously, having already forgotten about the limpness of them, the need to support the head. These were the babies of friends and family, a few days or weeks after their births, still inhabiting that hazy dream-space between the void and existence. Their parents seemed to be in this space too, wide-eyed and disbelieving, overwhelmed by a tide of change.  After the birth of one of her children, I asked a friend how she was feeling. I’m drowning, she said.

It was from this place – close to babies, yet at a distance from my own, that The End We Start From came. Remembering that hazy, in-between, watery world in which it can feel as though you are drowning. Imagining what it would be like if the world of two new parents was to be literally flooded: if their home was destroyed just as it welcomed new life. It was this central image that guided the book: the flood of new parenthood made real, the threat of chaos and calamity come true. But I also wanted – or needed, perhaps – to reach into the waters for a fragment of hope, some piece of joy in the middle of terror. And in the end it was a baby’s scrappy breath – and the love that willed it on – that gave the book its beginning.

As apocalyptic floods submerge London, a woman gives birth to her first child. Soon the family are forced to flee in search of safety, moving from place to place on a journey of fear and wonder, as the baby grows and thrives against the odds. Megan Hunter's beautiful, spare prose paints an imagined future which is terrifying in its realism.