2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness – an overlooked crumb, left behind when the Earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills... [p. 192]

Peggy is eight years old in 1976, living in north London with her concert-pianist mother Ute and her father James. James and his friends, the North London Retreaters -- who believe the apocalypse is imminent, most likely via economic collapse or a Russian nuke -- meet at the house, and Peggy is fascinated by their planning. Then something changes (Peggy doesn't understand what, but it's fairly obvious to the adult reader) and Peggy and her father flee to Die Hutte, deep in a German forest, for what is initially termed a holiday. Except that one day her father returns from the forest, weeping, and tells Peggy that the rest of the world has disappeared. ( Read more... )