The Age of Miracles

The narrator in this dystopian story is sweet but knowing, an introverted middle school girl having to navigate a world slowly falling apart. It is her voice that carried me through, that drew me in and made it all real. There are no false notes in this book, just the genuine life of a girl trying to get by and grow up. Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY

People ∙ O: The Oprah Magazine ∙ Financial Times ∙ Kansas City Star ∙ BookPage ∙ Kirkus Reviews ∙ Publishers Weekly ∙ Booklist

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“It’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass — it’s the ones you don’t expect at all,” says Julia, in this spellbinding novel of catastrophe and survival by a superb new writer. Luminous, suspenseful, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles tells the haunting and beautiful story of Julia and her family as they struggle to live in a time of extraordinary change.

On an ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia awakes to discover that something has happened to the rotation of the earth. The days and nights are growing longer and longer; gravity is affected; the birds, the tides, human behavior, and cosmic rhythms are thrown into disarray. In a world that seems filled with danger and loss, Julia also must face surprising developments in herself, and in her personal world — divisions widening between her parents, strange behavior by her friends, the pain and vulnerability of first love, a growing sense of isolation, and a surprising, rebellious new strength. With crystalline prose and the indelible magic of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker gives us a breathtaking portrait of people finding ways to go on in an ever-evolving world.

"[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

"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

"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

"Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving." Kirkus Reviews (starred 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

"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 Sittenfeld, author of Prep

"'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

"Is the end near? In Karen Thompson Walker's beautiful and frightening debut, sunsets are becoming rarities, 'real-timers' live in daylight colonies while mainstream America continues to operate on the moribund system of 'Clock Time,' and environmentalists rail against global dependence on crops that guzzle light. Against this apocalyptic backdrop, Walker sets the coming-of-age story of brave, bewildered Julia, who wonders at the 'malleable rhythms'of the increasingly erratic adults around her. 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 California 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!

"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 loves, 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

"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 For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

"Reading The Age of Miracles is like gazing into a sky of constellations and being mesmerized by the the strange yet familiar sensation of infinity. Beautifully written, the novel lets the readers see the world within us and the world without with an unforgettable freshness." Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

"The Age of Miracles is harrowing and beautiful on the ways in which those catastrophes already hidden about us in plain sight, once ratcheted up just a bit, provide us with a glimpse of the end of our species' run on earth: the uncanny distress of hundreds of beached whales, or the surreal unease of waves rolling across the rooftops of beachfront houses. And as it does it reminds us of all of the miracles of human regard that will have taken place before then: the way compassion will retain its resilience, and the way, for those of us in love, a string of afternoons will be as good as a year." Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway (National Book Award finalist)

“Part speculative fiction, part coming-of-age story…The Age of Miracles could turn Walker into American literature's next big thing.” NPR

“Walker creates lovely, low-key scenes to dramatize her premise….The spirit of Ray Bradbury hovers in the mixture of the portentous and quotidian.” The New Yorker

“[A] gripping debut...Thompson’s Julia is the perfect narrator....While the apocalypse looms large — has in fact already arrived — the narrative remains fiercely grounded in the surreal and horrifying day-to-day and the personal decisions that persist even though no one knows what to do. 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 (starred review)

Karen Thompson Walker is the author of The Age of Miracles, which was a New York Times bestseller. She was born and raised in San Diego and is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work — sometimes while riding the subway. She currently lives in Iowa with her husband.

I had always wanted to do these two things: to write books and to have children...

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