The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

And my guess is that this book started as the former and was spliced into the latter. In other words, what we have here is a fine coming-of-age novel wrapped in a high concept. Likewise, Julia's suffering at the hands of her crueller peers is skilfully done.

She is deft, convincing and sometimes brilliant in her evocation of a young girl's experience of complex and flawed adult relationships. Walker is a decent stylist of the keep-it-direct American school, though there are lapses: Julia misses Hanna, her best friend, 'like a phantom limb'.īut where Walker excels is voice. The answer to the second question is more complex. It is an interesting idea and, as far as I know, an original one. Meanwhile, 'real timers', who refuse to abide by 'clock time' and seek to live by the ever-lengthening circadian cycles, are vilified and go off to live in communes. 'The Slowing' gets worse as the novel progresses: birds find it harder to fly, crops start to fail, whales beach, trees fall, radiation increases and random people start to suffer from a mysterious illness – 'the syndrome'.

Faced with panic, the government quickly decides that the best plan is for everyone to live on the original 24-hour clock – 'clock time' – though this means that it is no longer necessarily light in the day, nor dark at night. The periods of daylight and darkness grow ever longer. Ostensibly, this is a novel about the gradual slowing down of the Earth's rotation as told by an 11-year-old girl from the Californian suburbs who is now turning 12. The answer to the first is fairly straightforward.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker