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The world is drowning. London disappears beneath the rising tide, and in the same breath, a child is born. Life and loss entwined, beginning and end bleeding into each other like ink in water.

Megan Hunter writes with a poet’s restraint, each sentence a ripple that expands beyond the page, deep with unspoken things. There is a sparseness here, an economy of language that leaves space for echoes, for breath, for the reader’s own mind to fill the gaps. This is not a book that tells—it suggests, a whisper of a novel, a series of fleeting moments strung together like prayer beads.

At its heart, this is a book about motherhood, about the raw, feral devotion of bringing a life into an unraveling world. The narrator is unnamed, as is almost everyone—only initials remain, skeletal, as if names no longer hold weight in a landscape stripped of certainty. The flood takes everything: cities, homes, futures. But in the wake of loss, there is the fragile, stubborn persistence of love. Of survival.

Hunter’s prose drifts between reality and myth, interweaving the story of this one woman and her child with ancient voices, fragments of prophecy, visions of the world collapsing and being remade. The water rises, the people scatter, the baby grows. There is no grand narrative, no clear arc. Only the passing of time, the small intimacies of existence—a hand gripping a finger, a body curled protectively around another. And yet, within that quiet, there is a weight, a profundity.

This is not a book you read so much as one you experience. You let it wash over you, submerge you, carry you away. It is short, but vast. Spare, but unshakable. Like floodwater creeping ever closer, its depth alluring and slowly seeping into the corners of your mind.

And so we begin again.