Contrary to what I’ve seen from other reviewers, I really enjoyed the main character’s narration in this dystopia-survival novel. It’s not a style for all readers, but you’ll appreciate it if - like me - you enjoy feeling like you’re in the protagonist’s head viewing the events through their lens. Since Kit is an unreliable narrator, their observations are tainted by their palpable but unknown past trauma. Not a long novel, but dense in a wrong way, heavily narrated, more like a stream of consciousness narrative of a young woman trapped on a small island following the end of the world as she knew it. It’s just her and a man, just the two of them. And then another woman washes ashore. Some drama ensues. Tantalizing prose carries what is essentially a cautionary tale about unintended consequences; Calder is worth watching. But oh was I disappointed. I struggled to finish it, irritated by the voice of the narrator, Kit, and uneasy about the relationship between her and Crevan, with its underlying hints of some sort of weirdness between them. (Is it supposed to be some form of consensual sado-masochism? Or a man taking advantage of a vulnerable woman? Later events throw some light on this but in an unsatisfactory way.)

A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. Kit relates how a bacteria had emerged on the mainland that could “devour plastic by the tonne”, offering a solution to the proliferation of plastics destroying the planet. But new strains evolved and began to consume everything. Then they developed “a taste for the human…”.In fiction, not every apocalypse is apocalypse wow. It’s what you’re hoping for, looking for, but not all apocalypses are imagined equal. This one, was imagined well, alarmingly so, and even spun around into a neat twist in the end but getting there was as slog. Whether Violent or Natural hits you like a shot of the very good stuff – which it is. I downed it in one. It went down very smoothly. There is – in all the right ways – a faint top-note of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, but it’s very much its own dark-hearted, complex, and accomplished thing, with an engaging narrator as snarled in the seductive tangle of her own words as she is hemmed in by the overgrown vegetation that covers the small island on which she is trapped.” – C. A. Fletcher, author of A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

the main character is so distasteful and despicable (and cringe might i add) that i want to spend the least amount of time with her as possible. this is the first and hopefully last time i will see a character use 'daddy' to refer to their partner. I also thought Ms. Calder’s choice to have Kit narrate the story was problematic. Kit is not at all likable. She’s highly narcissistic, dishonest, manipulative, and even murderous. It’s difficult to become involved in a story told by someone so dislikeable and undeserving of sympathy. Whether Violent or Natural is a visceral and tension filled read. The flow of language reads effortlessly, and the combination of short and long chapters paces the story brilliantly and allows the sense of menace to ebb and flow. The story is told from Kit`s point of view. In this, Natasha Calder has created such an authentic voice for Kit and her complexities, she makes a compelling narrator. With “Whether Violent or Natural,” author Natasha Calder has given us a dystopian novel about the end of humanity. While I admired some of her expressive, even lyric prose, I also thought the book burdened by a number of problems and inconsistencies. All in all, it’s not the best dystopian novel I’ve ever read.

This dystopian novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by antibiotic resistance. Main characters Kit and Crevan live on an isolated island in a bunker beneath a crumbling castle. Their secluded existence is disrupted when a nearly drowned woman washes ashore, sparking tension and uncovering secrets that threaten their fragile haven. Experimental fiction . . . Calder tells a unique tale that will appeal to many cli-fi fans.” – Library Journal if i had a penny for every useless word in here i would be reading my next book on a throne of pennies, inside my house made of pennies on the slopes of Penny Mountain.

Now I’m at the point of publication, I’ve had enough distance from the book to see several things I’d do differently, but I’m happy with it as a product of what I was capable of at the time. My only misgiving is Kit – in bringing this story to a wider audience, I can’t help but feel I’ve betrayed a confidence. I know: ridiculous. I hope, though, that others will enjoy Kit’s company as much as I have. Calder is an intensely lyrical writer whose passages in another form might be read as prose poetry. While there are moments of great brilliance in her prosaic style, the claustrophobia of the relentlessly dense work means they are seldom given room to breathe. The cumulative effect reads as self-indulgent on the part of the author who becomes a victim of her own writerly talent by over-cooking it. Less would definitely have been more. For those drawn to this novel for its premise, looking to inhabit this dystopian world and understand how it works, these eloquent but elongated musings will be difficult to wade through. If you are attracted, however, by the thought of luxuriating inside the mind of an intelligent, verbose narrator who articulates her observations and reflections in minute detail, then Kit is the protagonist for you. Kit and Crevan are living on an island while bacterial infections rage on the mainland in this dystopian novel. One day, they find a half-drowned woman in the sea, and Crevan chooses to save her. The novel is told from Kti’s perspective, and she slowly reveals the secrets of her traumatic past and how she is coping with them in the present. Polyethylene terephthalate was welcomed as a miracle invention; cheap, durable, light. Good old plastic. But the savior turned out to be a leviathan in disguise, threatening to suffocate the earth due to the very characteristics that were once regarded as benefits. A solution arrived in the form of plastic eating bacteria, unfortunately metamorphosing into a usurper when rogue antibiotic resistant bacteria evolve and mutate. Mankind is helpless in the face of medical threats resurrected from the past: syphilis, tuberculosis, cholera, tetanus, bubonic plague, pneumonia, septicemia. Infrastructure and medical and household appliances are destroyed when all plastic components are consumed in a bacterial feeding frenzy. What is left of humanity is less than human; constantly fighting for survival. The author has used the unreliable witness trope to drive the plot. For me there's nothing wrong with using tried and tested methods to explore human nature and the darkness therein, the nature of reality and how suffering can break us and spread to those close to us. In this book, it worked a little sometimes and lapsed into dull cliché other times; generally bogged down by the language. On balance lukewarm.

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I hate being negative when I write a review, but I also need to be honest. This is one of the oddest books I’ve read. I have read many dystopian books, and this just didn’t hit the mark for me. The narrator of British author Calder’s eerie dystopian novel is a young woman living on an isolated island within sight of a mainland ravaged by infection.

In this world plagued by mutating bacteria, prevention of contamination is all consuming. The remaining survivors must do what they can to survive infection, including avoiding any other humans. When a woman washes ashore, barely alive, the real story begins. Kit and Crevan are always on the same wavelength so when Crevan wishes to save the woman and Kit disagrees, tension ramps up, events escalate and buried secrets surface. Is this idyllic existence all it seems or is the truth too much to bear? I really wanted to like this book. Some of its passages will stay with me for a very long time; it carries a lyrical resonance that reminded me of being caught in a daydream, contemplating all kinds of metaphors for life. The book’s narrator Kit is incredibly insightful and sharp in her observations on post-apocalyptic life and scarily enough, some of these observations are useful for everyday life too. An unconscious woman washes ashore on the island where 'Kit' and Crevan dwell in isolation and safety from an, ostensibly, savage post apocalyptic outside world. Drama unfolds from there. This book takes place in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which antibiotic-resistant superbacteria have evolved which can eat through any and all plastics as well as being deadly and contagious, a combination which swiftly destroyed humans and their society at the same time. Kit, our POV character, was all alone on her island for a long time before Crevan came along and changed her lonely world. But after Crevan rescues a drowning woman from the ocean, everything changes.

Even better – and somewhat more critically – Kit’s arrival also precipitated a revelation as to subject matter. bones of an interesting story - dystopian chaos future where a superbug has left a woman and a man to their own on an island. enter (on the tides) a floating mystery body. An unnerving, sinister, and brilliant dystopian novel about the choices we make at the end of the world, posing the question: Who can you trust when there’s almost no one left? At times I felt information was dropped like stone, or maybe an avalanche. Here, the guise of narration in the MC's voice grew too thin.