Product Description

In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox's main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, one of the most dangerous teenagers in the country, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. Raised on a diet of evangelistic hellfire, Bethany is violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters - a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion. But when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, and a brilliant, gentle physicist enters the equation, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator, or could she be the harbinger of imminent global cataclysm on a scale never seen before? And what can love mean in 'interesting times'? A haunting story of human passion and burning faith set against an adventure of tectonic proportions, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind's self-destruction in a world on the brink.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33314 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
'A mastercalss on how to write an engaging thriller about a relevant contemporary issue while still respecting the reader's brain cells....you'll be gripped.' - Irvine Welsh --The Guardian

A masterclass on how to write an engaging thriller about a relevant contemporary issue while still respecting the reader's brain cells... you'll be gripped. --Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

Compelling... Jensen writes with energy and chutzpah about the scarily possible... electric and elegiac. --The Independent

Review
'An end-of-days blockbuster to haunt your nightmares...unputdownable.'

A rollicking eco-thriller that successfully marries high-octane action with a prescient overview of the dangers of climate change...Deliciously apocalyptic and jammed full of ideas, this is storytelling at its rapturous best.

Wildly original...Gripping and crammed with ideas, with big, topical themes and well-drawn characters.

Review
Mind-bendingly original... a convincing and compelling brew... much more intelligent, not to mention disturbing, than the vast majority of disaster stories.

Customer Reviews

'If I didn't know back then that turbulence obeys specific rules, I know it now
'That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years'.

The novel opens with a masterly evocation of a desperately hot summer when 'the sky pressed down like a furnace lid'. It's the near future and weather disasters are becoming far more frequent as the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable. Except it seems that someone may be able to predict the weather disasters... Gabrielle Fox's adolescent psychiatric patient Bethany Krall seems to be tuned into weather after her ECT treatment. Gabrielle has had a break from work after the car accident which killed her lover and left her in a wheelchair. She is vulnerable to Bethany's taunts of 'Wheels' but is starting to rebuild her life with the new job and new man Dr Frazer Melville.

Jensen interweaves her eco/psychological thriller with a love story and juxtaposes the scientific reaction to the apocalyptic conditions with the religious response of 'The Rapture'.

For me, she managed all of these strands very well. I read the novel in one sitting and was surprised that I hadn't hear of so skilful an author before. Since then the book has been chosen for Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and seems set for commercial success.

Apocalyptic thriller
Gabrielle Fox, the main character, is unlike any other heroine I have read about. She is very vulnerable after having survived a traumatic car accident. Her career as a psychotherapist leads her to a job in a psychiatric hospital for troubled teenagers. There she meets Bethany, a 16 year old who has murdered her own mother and who also seems able to predict natural disasters. Gabrielle has the task of discovering if Bethany really can tell the future or whether she is a very talented manipulator. Even given Bethany's crime and appalling attitude, I found myself warming to her character. The fact that she comes from an Evangelical background, her father being a preacher man, is crucial to the plot. As an open-minded atheist I found the religious thread that runs through this story absolutely fascinating. I feel that whatever your thoughts on the Bible stories, this book will give you some intelligent food for thought. There is a lot of technical talk, but don't be put off by this as most of it can easily be understood by the context.

The author has included a note at the end of The Rapture in which she explains the intent behind her story. Jensen's writing is so eloquent that I was compelled to discover how the story ends, what would become of Bethany and uncover exactly how she knew of the forthcoming disasters. Along the way I felt the pain and emotional traumas that both Gabrielle and Bethany suffer. Both are fragile in their own ways and in need of love and care. This is a hard hitting topical storyline that made me sit up and listen to the message that Jensen is trying to get across. The ending blew me away and left me feeling that we really must pull together as a race and look after our planet.

To sum up, this is a captivating apocalyptic thriller set in the very near future. It's an extremely intelligent piece of work from Jensen, and she must have put in an incredible amount of hours of research to create a terrifyingly plausible storyline in The Rapture. It was a haunting read and one that I will be thinking about for a long time.

COMPELLING
Like most of the readers here, I was pulled into this story from the outset, and felt compelled to keep on reading until I had finished the last page.

The story revolves (or rather swirls) around three key characters, Gabrielle Fox, Frazier Melville, and Bethany Krall. Bethany is the key figure, however the really interesting character, (for me), is Gabrielle Fox, the narrator. Wheelchair bound following an accident, she is a combination of toughness and fragility, with a strong survival streak. There is touch of Kay Scarpetta in her salty-honest, courageous, sometimes mean yet often sympathetic character. you can't help liking Bethany either, in a perverse way, even if its only for her brutal ability to foresee disaster, and call a spade a spade. You know she is the perpertrator of an horrific killing, but in the end, is Bethany really a monster? Read and find out.

The romance with the physicist Frazer Melville is a nice counterpoint. I liked reading about the relationship, it shows Gabrielle's inner vulnerabilities, draws out her grit and rounds the character off nicely. Contrary to one of the earlier reviewers, I thought this interlude balanced the rollercoaster ride of thrill and danger very adroitly.

Some of the secondary characters are sketchily drawn, the slightly mad ex therapist Joy McConey, who is convinced that Bethany is psychically causing the terrible events, the self-serving head of the psychiatric unit, Dr Sheldon-Gray. However, when it comes to the larger than life mafia style evangalist, Leonard Krall, (who is Bethany's dad) there is no mistaking the odd admixture of passion and egoism, sincerity and fakery, and sheer ruthless drive of the old school proselyte.

One very distinctive character is Harish Modak - the jaded planetarian - with his old world charm and cool civility is depicted as being in opposition to the human species presiding over the planet. Nevertheless he agrees to assist in saving lives. His complex personality, drawn with a lightness of touch, lends freshness to the tense, and at times claustrophobic atmposphere.

The story is replete with good solid earthy humour, along with some unforgettable scenes and imagry. Take for example, Bethany, stretched out in the back of the car as the trio zoom towards London for the apocalpytic showdown; 'ghostly helment of stubble,' and 'resembling 'a chained beast awaiting its glory moment.' Anyone who has ever owned a burr headed, sulky teenager can relate to that one I'm sure.

There are lots of interesting scientific and artistic elements in this book. I particularly liked the notion of environmental turbulence encapsulated within the paintings of Van Gogh. Could Van Gogh - like Bethany - have possessed the poisoned chalice of being a human seismograph as well as being a gifted artist? Did that motivate and inform his work? Having recently (coincidently) finished reading an illustrated biography of the painter, set during his time in Arles in France, I found this idea intriguing. The paintings of the period - as mentioned in The Rapture - are perhaps Van Gogh's most eerily imaginative works.

A great read, on many levels. Sci-fi, environmental thriller, pyschological quest, apocalyptic disaster, ecological warning, scientific study. The dramatic ending completes a vividly entertaining journey.