Imagine waking up to find that Earth's rotation has slowed —
inexplicably — and the 24-hour day now has 56 extra minutes. And
imagine what happens if Earth turns more and more slowly — still
for no reason — until days last as long as weeks. That's the
disturbing premise behind the new novel, The Age of Miracles.
And the effects of what becomes known as "the slowing" are
calamitous: birds fall from the sky; whales beach themselves.
The oceans shift, and communities wash away. Gravity
intensifies, magnetic fields decay and radiation floods the
planet. Plants and animals die off. Author Karen Thompson Walker
tells NPR's Melissa Block that she got the idea for the book
when she read a startling fact: The 2004 earthquake in Indonesia
was so powerful that it accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the
day by a tiny fraction of a second. "I thought it was incredibly
unsettling that that could happen, that something that I had
always taken for granted — you know, the steady rising and
setting of the sun every day — was