Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Brilliant and original, THE STRANDING illuminates the beauty and fragility of humanity with a story so immersive and tender; I was surprised to find myself still in familiar surroundings when I surfaced from it. Kate Sawyer masterfully weaves a gripping narrative between a world disappeared and a world that must begin anew in this ultimately hopeful tale of love, loss and survival in the face of overwhelming odds. With characters you'll be thinking about long after the end, THE STRANDING is an absolute must read! Get one for yourself and one for a friend * Buki Papillon, author of An Ordinary Wonder * The Stranding is a meditative examination of life and death. It's also a useful manual for surviving nuclear Armageddon - turns out you can hide under under the tongues of large mammals. Before is mostly concerned with Ruth's relationship with Alex. It becomes clear to the reader very early on that it's a pretty toxic relationship, but most of the Before timeline is spent following Ruth as she discovered that for herself. I didn't want this book to end. It blew me away, and moved me beyond belief. I want to read it again and again and again * Bryony Gordon, author of Mad Girl * So what has changed since Ghosh published The Great Derangement? “I think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018,” he says now. “It was partly because there were so many extreme climate events that year – the California wildfires, flooding in India, a succession of brutal hurricanes – but partly also because of the publication of Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”
BBC Sounds - The Stranding by Kate Sawyer - Available Episodes
It is extraordinary, and quietly revolutionary, for a novel centred around the end of the world to feel so affirming, so luminous, so hopeful. In both the Before and After times, Ruth's seeking of what it is that matters is moving, complex, and vividly drawn. I've not stopped thinking about The Stranding since I put it down * Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook * I don’t think it’s my way to ask much of others, but now I am asking each of you to give me one day where you leave any animosity at the gate and try to remember that you love each other.”Tokarczuk, who laid out her environmental agenda in her eco-whodunnit Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, called for a return to the perspective of parable, and for the development of what she called a “tender narrator”, a quantum version of the omniscient narrator, capable of seeing in many dimensions. Quite how this would work she didn’t know, because it had yet to be invented. In the meantime, we should abandon traditional distinctions between high- and lowbrow fiction and trust to fragments. “In this way,” she said, literature can “set off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events.” I loved Mary's relationship with her mother in law (Irene), and the questions this raised about our obligation to family.
Review: The Stranding By Kate Sawyer - Yorkshire Times
For a book that has quite a meditative tone, it is not at all slow paced. The chapters are fairly short, and it is very difficult to end a reading session on a present day chapter because the next one will segue into a memory that you will be curious to access. In a dual timeline that switches cleverly from the day itself to the past (no specific dates are given but the switch from present to past tense denotes the change), we begin to understand the threads that hold this family together, and the stitches that have torn apart over the years. Will she survive? What has caused this mess? Ruth needs to figure out how to stay alive... So, what did I think?
Recent Posts
It wasn't Phoebe's addiction or behaviour due to her addiction that made me hate her, although this certainly didn't help, but it was the sheer nastiness and disregard she had for other people and their feelings, for pretty much the whole novel.
Kate Sawyer | Goodreads This Family by Kate Sawyer | Goodreads
Not everything makes sense. It seems that almost everybody the world over is dead but oddly other animals are still OK. Fish are swimming, mussels are spawning, rabbits and deer are running about the woods providing food for Nik and Ruth. That said, I didn't really care if the story wasn't 100% logical or rational. I loved it in spite of such things. I can definitely see the interest, however; one story split into two is an excellent idea, but sadly it didn’t pay off. Each side was rather interesting alone, but combined it seemed rather messy and confused. This isn’t so fanciful, given the “rights of nature” movement, which Robert Macfarlane has described as “the new animism”. Two years ago, Macfarlane reported on a move by residents of the US city of Toledo to draw up an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Erie, granting it legal personhood and according it rights in law to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”. But it wasn’t quite that simple. “Ecosystems are not human, and they certainly don’t bear human responsibilities,” argued the bill’s organisers. “Rather, nature requires its own unique rights that recognise its needs and characteristics.”
Here's what our Grazia Book Club thought about The Stranding, by Kate Sawyer
What a fabulous piece of storytelling. So original and compelling and Kate Sawyer writes like a dream * Julie Owen Moylan, author * Bauer Consumer Media Ltd, Company number 01176085; Bauer Radio Limited, Company number: 1394141; Registered office: Media House, Peterborough Business Park, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA and H Bauer Publishing, Company number: LP003328; Registered office: The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PL
Great Deal 
New Comment