Karen Thompson Walker reads from The Age of Miracles
“[A] gripping debut … Thompson’s Julia is the perfect narrator … 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)
On a seemingly routine Saturday morning, eleven-year-old Julia and her family wake to an alarming news report announcing the slowing of the earth’s rotation. As a result of the “slowing,” the 24-hour day grows to 25 hours, then 26, increasing by several more minutes of sunlight and darkness each day. What follows is an undoing of life as we know it; crops dry, food and water supplies dwindle, unknown illnesses befall large swaths of the population, and entire species drop out of existence. A government mandate to follow the once universal 24-hour clock, drives a societal splinter between those who observe traditional time, ‘clock-timers’ and ‘real timers’, radicals, who mark the passing of days by the rise and fall of the sun. And yet, amid this portentous upheaval, Julia remains a typical young girl, making her way through the tumultuous terrain of adolescence– the slights that cut so deeply at that age; friendships that dissolve for no apparent reason, the flawed humanity of her parents and their marriage, and the wonder of first love.
Karen Thompson Walker holds an MFA from Columbia University and is a former editor of fiction and non-fiction at Simon & Schuster. A native of Del Mar, California, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband. This is her first book.
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