Verwandte Artikel zu Not with a Bang

Not with a Bang - Softcover

Oh, Temi

 
9781668203460: Not with a Bang
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668203464 ISBN 13: 9781668203460
Verlag: Saga Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Station Eleven meets Leave the World Behind in this family drama at the end of the world about a crumbling household’s attempts to find their way back to each other amidst a cataclysmic event.

"Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it."

The Minton family is in crisis. After losing his job, Marcus begins stockpiling cans, running evacuation drills and digging a doomsday bunker in the back garden. At the same time, his daughters are unravelling in their own ways – Chantale is being haunted by dreams of disaster, and Briar’s obsession with a missing classmate draws her deeper into the seductive world of a UFO cult. Meanwhile, no one is aware of the diagnosis their mother has been trying to keep hidden.

When, on the morning of the eldest daughter’s wedding, an extinction-level event tears the world apart, the Mintons must fight their way through a devastated city—back to safety, survival, and each other.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Temi Oh is a British Nigerian science fiction author, screenwriter, and neuroscientist. She is the author of the American Library Association’s Alex Award–winning Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, More Perfect, and Not With a Bang. She has also written stories for Marvel’s Black Panther, Doctor Who, and Overwatch. Her first short film Murmur was funded by Sky Arts and the BFI. Since then, she has written on the Netflix series Castlevania: Nocturne and the CBBC series Silverpoint.

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1. Kimona Minton KIMONA MINTON
— 5 DAYS BEFORE —

My mother would spend a couple of minutes every morning imagining what it would be like to lose everything she loved. The way some might count sheep, she counted backwards: the bed, the walls, her house, her husband, her daughters, one by one.

She’d picture the bed kneecapped by termites, white paint flaking off its four posts. The house snatched up in the blistering maw of some freak electrical fire. Steel herself against the thought. A bed was just a bed. A home was just a home.

Except she used to tell us that that bed was the loveliest thing she owned. That she hoped to be buried in it, hoped we’d lash it to a raft, her cool body under its quilted duvet, and set it sailing down the Thames.

“The Princess Bed,” our father teasingly called it. It was maximalist, bombastic, ostentatiously feminine, completely impractical—like my mother.

Five days before the world ended, she had been dreaming of an army of carpenter ants riddling holes into the magnificently carved headboard when her phone buzzed and startled her into wakefulness. She snatched it off the dresser.

An unidentified number. “Hello?”

“Is this Ms. Kimona Minton?” Leopard-skin dapples of sunlight fell on her muslin sheets.

“Doctor.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s Doctor Minton.”

There could be damp in the walls, in the joists and rafters. The house could crumble all at once like a diseased tooth. She tongued a familiar gap in her gums and imagined it.

Maybe it would be a relief. She’d never imagined she would grow old in the place where she had watched her own mother die, too young, of a tumour that had spidered through her skull.

“Claire? Is that you?”

“You have to answer these questions for security.”

“Fourteen Albert Road, Clapham, SW11…” She trailed off, glancing at the clock on the wall. It wasn’t even 7 a.m. “Isn’t this a bit early?”

“Sorry.” The voice on the phone was a little sheepish.

“Didn’t you say to expect a letter? That if the results were clear, I would get a letter. Not a call. A call is…”

“Yes…” Claire sounded hesitant. “Dr. Minton, the results from your biopsy—”

It was something about the tone of her voice. Kim felt a sick swoop in her stomach, terror and dread. Sweat needling the tips of her fingers. “Wait!” Slightly breathless. “Once you tell me, it will always be true.”

There was an arc to these stories, Kim knew. They began with some innocuous symptoms, headaches that were usually worse in the morning, fatigue, slight muscle weakness on her right side, a perfunctory visit to a GP, and ended with…

“Can I just hang up now and save my life?”

“You know it doesn’t work that way,” Claire said, not unkindly.

“It’s just, today is almost the worst day. My eldest daughter, Aaliyah, is getting married this weekend, and on Thursday we have this fancy rehearsal dinner and…”

“This is urgent.” Claire sounded as if she was losing her patience a little. “The sooner we start treatment…” she continued, but Kim stopped listening. She could taste bile in the back of her throat. Her eyes flitted out to the untended garden. Yellow sprays of dandelions across the sun-struck grass. Aaliyah had insisted they celebrate Kwanzaa the previous year, had decorated the house extravagantly in red, green, and black bunting that still hung on the washing line, cracking in the wind like her heart against her sternum. The sight was so familiar and suddenly strangely dear.

“Briar wants me to watch Hero’s approach with her…” I had set up a telescope on the porch ready for the night when the planet would hurtle into view. I had told her, “It’s a once-in-millennia event,” when I’d asked if she could take the night off work to watch it with me. “I’ll catch the next one,” she had replied breezily.

“This will only get worse if you ignore it,” Claire warned.

“Look, I’ll call you back later.” Kim moved to end the call and said, “By Sunday, it will be over.”

She meant the wedding.

For a long time, I believed that I hated my mother. If you’d asked me that summer, when I was seventeen, I would have given you a dozen reasons why.

She’d worked abroad for a couple of years when we were younger, leaving our father and grandfather to raise the four daughters she’d left behind. Motherless years of going to school without brushing our teeth, of matted hair and mismatched socks. After which, she’d returned a stranger to us.

It seemed to me that her whole self was a palace she built and rebuilt again every morning from the ground up. And always slightly differently. Stage makeup, mannerisms, hair. She had a variety of wigs that she kept on foam stands in her closet. There was the short black bobbed one she’d wear to parents’ evening, the auburn one she took on holiday, the ombré blonde for nights out. My favourite was the Afro she wore once to Notting Hill Carnival, which made her look like Erykah Badu. I can’t remember when I first discovered that they were wigs. But I do remember how, aged ten, I opened her closet to find those blind polystyrene heads lined up on a shelf like Bluebeard’s dead wives. Startled, I’d whispered, “Oh,” as if at the answer to a riddle I already knew.

It wasn’t just her appearance that changed; her entire personality shifted depending on who she was around. Her accent was full of cut glass when she spoke to her colleagues or the other parents at our school. But it grew round and undulant when she logged into Zoom calls with her cousins in Kwara State.

Sometimes she was a great mother, sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she was needy and affectionate, sometimes she was prickly and reserved. Her moods always seemed to affect the temperature in the house. That quicksilver crackle of her laughter from downstairs could coax the sun from behind a cloud. She could give something a sideways glance, and I’d go from loving it to despising it. I hated the power that she had over me. More than anything, because I was convinced that she didn’t love me. I used to try to get her to admit it.

One evening, a few months before the wedding, I said it quickly so as to catch her by surprise: “The house is on fire, who do you save?”

I was sure it would be Aaliyah. Longed-for Aaliyah, who they’d conceived after a couple of devastating losses. Our grandad used to joke that Aaliyah might as well have been gold-plated, and, for most of her life, they’d treated her as if she was. When I was ten, she’d won a scholarship to an exclusive tennis academy. She’d been on track to win her first Grand Slam title when she’d broken her wrist in a skiing accident a week before the Wimbledon Championships. A complicated fracture with severe ligament damage—specialist surgeons had told her she’d never play tennis again. At twenty-two, she’d remade her life, impressively, immediately. A couple of months later, she returned from a date to announce that she was engaged to the millionaire cousin of her former tennis coach, setting the wedding date so soon after her engagement that we’d initially—wrongly—assumed that she must be pregnant.

“I wouldn’t choose any of...

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Verlag
Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668203464
ISBN 13 
9781668203460
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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