Name: Not the End of the World
Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780316614306

Kate Atkinson

A B-list celebrity with a new baby on the way, Arthur's mother hires an enigmatic young nanny named Missy to care for her eight-year-old son, and together they embark on an odyssey in search of art, culture, and Arthur's missing father.

Stories

Not the End of the World

Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a B-list celebrity more concerned with her bank account than with her son's development. Then an enigmatic young nanny introduces him to a world he never knew existed.

I definitely read this in the wrong frame of mind and only when I finished did I realize. I thought it was a novel so the whole time I was trying to figure out the connections and predict how all of the different stories would come together, like in Atkinson’s other works that I have read. That was not the case- this was a collection of short stories with some small threads connecting them but I think I would have received it very differently if I knew that before I started the book. The ending did wrap up the collection very nicely even though I had the wrong idea of the goal. 

Billie Fogarty

Wonko the Sane

Abby T. Miller

The enchanted world of Kate Atkinson's short fiction is home to an entire constellation of unforgettable characters — a dead woman who remains involved in the life of her surviving family, a man vexed by a doppelganger who lives better than he does, and a nanny who (literally) takes flight. In scenes where comedy, tragedy, and myth collide to dazzling effect, as characters come and go (and, to the reader's delight, come back!), Not the End of the World offers an endlessly entertaining display of Atkinson's ferocious intelligence and startlingly fertile imagination.

Not the End of the World Stories

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