Awards
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2012 Powell's Staff Top 5s
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From Powells.com
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Staff Pick
This story takes place within a world identical to ours, except for the eerie fact that the days and nights start to grow longer and longer as time passes. What happens when you can no longer be sure that the sun will rise at the same time each morning? More about the small moments than the big ones, The Age of Miracles is a gentle apocalypse that gives you the time you need to think and breathe. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
With a voice as distinctive and original as that of
The Lovely Bones, and for the fans of the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood, Karen Thompson Walker’s
The Age of Miracles is a luminous, haunting, and unforgettable debut novel about coming of age set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
“It still amazes me how little we really knew....Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life — the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.
Review
"[Walker's] voice turns what might have been just a clever mash-up of disaster epic with sensitive young-adult, coming-of-age story into a genuinely moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Review
"The Age of Miracles spins its glowing magic through incredibly lucid and honest prose, giving equal care and dignity to the 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 The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Review
"Gripping from first page to last, The Age of Miracles is itself 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
Review
"Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
"The Age of Miracles is pure magnificence. Deeply moving and beautifully executed, Karen Thompson Walker has written the perfect novel for the global-warming age." Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank
About the Author
Karen Thompson Walker is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program and a recipient of the 2011 Sirenland Fellowship as well as a Bomb magazine fiction prize. A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work. Born and raised in San Diego, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband. The Age of Miracles is her first book.