Meridian 144 - Softcover

Files, Meg

3.57 out of 5 stars

14 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1618682229 ISBN 13: 9781618682222

Publisher: Permuted Press, 2014

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She is 50 feet underwater, scuba diving on an old sunken warship in the harbor of a Pacific island, which is about as far away as she can get from her unhappy divorce, a string of unfulfilling affairs and her persistent lack of conviction about her life. Kit Manning wonders if Tano Island will be for her a point of departure to somewhere better. Then everything turns a bright yellow, “the water like wrinkled amber foil.” Her new beau, an air force captain from the island’s base, swims down to her, frantic. “Fireball” he writes on a slate. The shock wave that follows is terrifying; it tips the sunken vessel over. When Kit surfaces alone, she returns to a devastated harbor and perhaps a decimated world. When she emerges from the sea, it is as if for the first time. Everything has changed. No one else can define her life anymore. . . or save it.

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About the Author

Files has taught creative writing for over twenty-five years at Colorado Mountain College, the University of Maryland, Western New Mexico University, and the University of Arizona. Currently, she teaches at Pima College in Tucson and directs the Pima Writers' Workshop.

Carly Robins is an actress and voice-over artist. She can be heard on commercials, video games, and promos. Carly comes to narration with a passion for performance along with the capability to span several genres, from romance to children's literature and thrillers.

From Kirkus Reviews

In the tradition of visionary, end-of-the-world novels, Files's debut rates low, as a woman survives a nuclear holocaust only to spend the rest of her time on earth contemplating her botched-up love life. The time is now, the place is a Pacific island something like Guam that's divided up arbitrarily among the natives, Japanese tourists, and the US military. Catherine Manning, a schoolteacher recently escaped from a joyless marriage and neurotic urban lifestyle on the US mainland, is scuba-diving off the coast with her current beau, an Air Force captain, when there's a sudden flash of light, an earthquake-like shudder, and an eruption of underwater debris. The captain is killed, and when a panicky Catherine, gulping mouthfuls of bottled oxygen, emerges from the watery depths, it is to find a world decimated by nuclear war. While repairing to the local dive shop to stockpile more bottles of uncontaminated air, releasing her dog from the island's quarantine pen (where it has miraculously survived), and scouring the island for packaged food, decent shelter and other survivors, Catherine begins to turn her thoughts inexplicably to the cindered remains of her own love life. Descriptions of her anxiety-ridden childhood, her unhappy marriage, and a series of sordid extramarital affairs are not only interspersed quite awkwardly with vivid evocations of a post-holocaust world and of violent confrontations with other survivors, but they're given equal weight--a decision that would be funny if it weren't so depressing. In the end, Catherine manages to join a group of ``good'' survivors to try to carry on the human race--though the reader, chilled to the bone by Catherine's phenomenal narcissism, may wonder why they bother. An oddity--cheerless and somber, with all the trappings and none of the import of literary profundity. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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