The Daily

In her new novel, “The Age of Miracles,” Karen Thompson Walker imagines a scenario in which the planet’s rotation slows, resulting in chaos and calamity. As the possible end of the world goes on around her, Julia, the story’s 12-year-old narrator, lives her life in all its tender, adolescent normalcy. Walker spoke to The Daily about the book and the real-life disasters that helped shape her story.

I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times — but how did you come up with the idea to have Earth slow its rotation? I got the idea from something that actually happened. In 2004, following the earthquake in Indonesia, the one that caused the tsunami, I read that the earthquake was so strong that it also affected the rotation of the Earth. After that, our 24-hour days were a fraction of a second shorter than they used to be. Even though the change was slight, I found it really unsettling to hear that something I had always taken for granted — the predictable rising and setting of the sun — was actually in flux. I began to wonder right away what would happen, and how we would react, if a larger shift ever took place.