The Rapture

By Liz Jensen

An electrifying story of science, faith, love, and self-destruction in a world on the brink.

It is a June unlike any other before, with temperatures soaring to asphyxiating heights. All across the world, freak weather patterns—and the life-shattering catastrophes they entail—have become the norm. The twenty-first century has entered a new phase.

But Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her life after a devastating car accident that has left her disconnected from the world, a prisoner of her own guilt and grief. Determined to make a fresh start, and shake off memories of her wrecked past, she leaves London for a temporary posting as an art therapist at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, home to one hundred of the most dangerous children in the country. Among them: the teenage killer Bethany Krall.

Despite two years of therapy, Bethany is in no way rehabilitated and remains militantly nonchalant about the bloody, brutal death she inflicted on her mother. Raised in evangelistic hellfire, the teenager is violent, caustic, unruly, and cruelly intuitive. She is also insistent that her electroshock treatments enable her to foresee natural disasters—a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion.

But as Gabrielle delves further into Bethany’s psyche, she begins to note alarming parallels between her patient’s paranoid disaster fantasies and actual incidents of geological and meteorological upheaval—coincidences her professionalism tells her to ignore but that her heart cannot. When a brilliant physicist enters the equation, the disruptive tension mounts—and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator or a harbinger of global disaster on a scale never seen before? Where does science end and faith begin? And what can love mean in “interesting times”?

With gothic intensity, Liz Jensen conjures the increasingly unnerving relationship between the traumatized therapist and her fascinating, deeply calculating patient. As Bethany’s warnings continue to prove accurate beyond fluke and she begins to offer scientifically precise hints of a final, world-altering cataclysm, Gabrielle is confronted with a series of devastating choices in a world in which belief has become as precious - and as murderous—as life itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Release date: Aug 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9780385530446

Liz Jensen

Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of eight acclaimed novels, including the Guardian-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Writers' Awards and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read, and, most recently, The Uninvited. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Liz Jensen lives in Wimbledon, London. www.lizjensen.com

Reviews for The Rapture

[ffortsa · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'm so glad this book was short. Even so, I picked it up and put it down several times, before finishing it off on a subway ride from Queens in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it takes place during one sex act. That says a lot. Don't bother.

[jimelkins · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Novels are ways of looking into other people's thoughts, and if you pick your books carefully, those thoughts will be ones you hadn't experienced. When we say a novel is "enriching," we signal the feeling of the density, depth, variety, or interest of the thoughts that we encounter in novels. But novels can also have the opposite effect. They can reveal an imagination so thin, so simple, so impoverished, that it feels unhealthy to think about it for too long. Minot's imagination in this book is brittle. Her sense of how people interact, what they think, what counts as introspection, what comprises interesting meditation, are so thin, so superficial, so uninteresting, that I felt a cold chill as I read. I felt my own sense of what inner life can be slowly weakening. If the book had been longer, I might have stopped reading: not because the book is boring or because she's a bad writer, but because her idea of what it means to think about relationships is so terribly, depressingly pale. Novels can not only be enriching but also impoverishing: they can take away a little of what you feel and think.

[9days_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Susan Minot really knows how to grab a reader with the opening (I read two paragraphs in-store and bought it). Unfortunately, this is where the talent ends (with this book, at least).The plot is small scale, and very intimate. So much so that I felt bogged down by too many details that weren't even interesting to begin with.The story is of two lovers reflecting on their relationship (the man, married, and the woman a colleague). It was obvious a few pages in where this book was going to wind up.The writing is good and the details are certainly detailed. But the characters are stereotypes and the plot goes nowhere.Overall, this book fails.

[arctic1stranger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

oh, the things that go through your mind when you are going down. a bit contrived, but interesting.