Karen 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.
Praise for The Age of Miracles
“[A] moving tale that mixes the real and surreal, the ordinary and
the extraordinary with impressive fluency and flair … Ms. Walker
has an instinctive feel for narrative architecture, creating a
story, in lapidary prose, that moves ahead with a sense of both the
inevitable and the unexpected … Ms. Walker maps [her characters’]
inner lives with such sure-footedness that they become as
recognizable to us as people we’ve grown up with or watched for
years on television… [A] precocious debut…one of this summer’s hot
literary reads.”--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“THE NEXT BIG FEMALE NOVELIST.” --Rolling Stone
“THE SUMMER BOOK.” --Vanity Fair.com
“[AN] EARTHSHAKING DEBUT.” –Entertainment Weekly
“Part speculative fiction, part coming-of-age story…The Age of
Miracles could turn Walker into American literature's next big
thing.”--NPR
“A tender coming-of-age novel.”--Maureen Dowd, The New York
Times
“Walker creates lovely, low-key scenes to dramatize her premise…The
spirit of Ray Bradbury hovers in the mixture of the portentous and
quotidian.”--The New Yorker
“[Walker] matches the fierce creativity of her imagination with a
lyrical and portentous understanding of the present.”--People (4
stars)
“This haunting and soul-stirring novel about the apocalypse is
transformative and unforgettable.”--Marie Claire
“Quietly explosive … Walker describes global shifts with a sense of
utter realism, but she treats Julia’s personal adolescent upheaval
with equal care, delicacy, and poignancy.”—O, The Oprah
Magazine
“Haunting.”--Real Simple
“If you begin this book, you'll be loath to set it down until
you've reached its end… The Age of Miracles reminds us that we
never know when everything will change, when a single event will
split our understanding of personal history and all history into a
Before and an After.” –The San Francisco Chronicle
“The perfect combination of the intimate and the
pandemic…Flawlessly written; it could be the most assured debut by
an American writer since Jennifer Egan's ‘Emerald City.’”--Denver
Post
“Touching, observant and poetic.”--The Columbus Dispatch
“Simply told, skillfully crafted and filled with metaphorical
unities, this resonant first novel [rings] with difficult truths
both large and small.”--Kansas City Star
"The Age of Miracles lingers, like a faded photo of a happy time.
It is stunning.”–Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Both utterly realistic and fantastically dystopian…The big
miracles, Walker seems to be saying, may doom the world at large,
but the little ones keep life worth living.”--Minnesota Herald
Tribune
“[An] elegiac, moving first novel.”--Newsday
“Arresting… This book cuts bone-deep.” --Austin Chronicle
“Evocative and poetic...I loved this book from the first
page.”--Huntington News
“Walker’s tone can be properly [Harper] Lee-esque; both Julia and
Scout grapple with the standard childhood difficulties as their
societies crumble around them. But life prevails, and the stunning
Miracles subtly conveys that adapting.”--Time Out New York
“[A] gripping debut . . . Thompson’s Julia is the perfect narrator.
. . . While the apocalypse looms large—has in fact already
arrived—the narrative remains fiercely grounded in the surreal and
horrifying day-to-day and the personal decisions that persist even
though no one knows what to do. A triumph of vision, language, and
terrifying momentum, the story also feels eerily plausible, as if
the problems we’ve been worrying about all along pale in comparison
to what might actually bring our end.”—Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“In Walker’s stunning debut, a young California girl coming of age
in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on
the most personal level as life on earth withers … She goes through
the trials and joys of first love. She begins to see cracks in her
parents’ marriage and must navigate the currents of loyalty and
moral uncertainty. She faces sickness and death of loved ones. ...
Julia’s life is shaped by what happens in the larger world, but it
is the only life she knows, and Walker captures each moment,
intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting,
heartbreaking, profoundly moving.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred
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
“‘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
“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!
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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)
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