KAREN THOMPSON WALKER / The Age of Miracles
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER / The Age of Miracles
Please help us celebrate one of the most-talked about debuts this year!
“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 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.
Extraordinary for its startlingly original concept, unforgettable characters and poetically punctuated prose, The Age of Miracles is moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
“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
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.
NPR includes The Age of Miracles in its Literary Look Ahead: 13 Great Books On The Horizon
Movie rights for The Age of Miracles have been optioned by River Road Entertainment, with Seth Lochhead attached to adapt. River Road is the production company for The Tree of Life, Into the Wild, Brokeback Mountain, and more. Lochhead most recently wrote the screenplay for Hanna.
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
