the age of miracles by karen thompson walker

She also made a crucial change: to slow the earth, rather than speed it up. Years later she went back to the story and felt there was more to say. She immediately wrote a short story inspired by the notion. “Something we think of as stable and steady-sunset and sunrise.” “I just found that very haunting,” Walker says. The earthquake that preceded the tsunami was so powerful it affected the speed of the earth on its axis, shortening the length of a day by fractions of a second. Speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, Walker says the idea for The Age of Miracles came from a newspaper article about the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. Suddenly, adolescence is the least of Julia’s worries. No one knows how long the slowing might last or if it will get worse.

Kids wait for the school bus in pitch-dark people hang blackout curtains to sleep through the bright sun of night. Society must decide whether to follow “clock time” (the government’s choice) or real time (the anarchic, countercultural approach). Clocks become absurd, gravity goes wonky, the sun becomes a menace, the long nights are cold and terrifying. Days stretch out, growing first by a few minutes, then by hours.

Who among us hasn’t wished for more hours in a day? In Karen Thompson Walker’s exciting debut novel, The Age of Miracles, we get exactly that-with dire consequences.Įleven-year-old Julia is going about the business of growing up in suburban San Diego-piano lessons, sleepovers, a cute skater boy-when the inexplicable occurs: The earth begins to slow on its axis.

The age of miracles by karen thompson walker