To be published 24/06/2021…
When she got on the plane to New Zealand Ruth could never have imagined that she wouldn’t ever be going home again, that there would be no home left to go back to. Saved from a mysterious apocalypse by the bizarre chance of finding shelter inside a beached whale, all she can do is try to survive her new life with the handsome stranger she is now trapped in it with.
Filled with grief, Nik came to the beach for the photo opportunities that the beached whale provided; he could never have imagined that the whale would also provide his future home. And when he spies Ruth futilely trying to save the whale with a lunchbox filled with water he definitely wouldn’t have pictured sharing that home with her.
One of my favourite aspects of this book is the lack of detail; a sentence I never thought to write! Keeping the details of the apocalypse vague and unknown makes the whole plot just that much more ominous, creating an underlying tension and a sense of anticipation which is even more effective by the fact that it remains unfulfilled to the very end. This also allows the reader to experience the raw emotion of the apocalypse rather than being distracted by the science.
The emotion of this book pulled me along like a relentless current. Grief, loss, desperation, fear, hope, love, happiness, uncertainty; all of these emotions are explored on a loop throughout the book, made even more stark by the constant contrast between ‘before’ and ‘after’. When the two timelines converged in the final chapters I somehow felt all of those emotions at once, leaving me feeling quite bereft after the final page had turned.
I wanted to be able to guess the ending of this book and I definitely had a few ideas as I went along, one of which turned out to be right, but I never felt one hundred percent sure of what to expect until it actually happened. Starting the book with something so surprisingly quirky as surviving via whale meant that I was open for anything as the book progressed and couldn’t rule out any other startling possibilities.
Escape to the Bookshelf 