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Original Essays | April 16, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNThe Age of Miraclesby Karen Thompson Walker
Staff Pick
As if facing the everyday insecurities and turmoil of adolescence isn't enough, 11-year-old Julia lives within the reality of a post-apocalyptic situation as the earth's rotation begins slowing by measurable degrees each day. Relationships, personal and official, fracture, torn apart by the uncertainty of living in a world where time — night, day, schedules — no longer holds much meaning. In a tale that is as graceful as it is intelligent, as realistic as it is fantastic, this haunting debut creates a snapshot of a world changing beyond recognition. What effect will it have on you? Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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. 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
Review:"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
Review:"'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
Review:"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!
Review:"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
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 For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Review:"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
Review:"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)
About the AuthorKaren 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.
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