Title: Not With a Bang
Author: Temi Oh
Publisher: Saga Press
Publication date: July 14, 2026
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

What is expected to be a once-in-a-lifetime, awe-inducing astronomical event — a planet, or possibly moon or asteroid, expected to pass by Earth so closely as to be visible — turns cataclysmic in Not With a Bang. And yet, despite the catastrophe that turns life on Earth into “before” and “after”, the story here is very much about a family — what brings them together and what tears them apart.

Marcus and Kim Minton have four daughters. Their oldest, Aaliyah, is about to be married at age 22. Briar, 17, and Tanice, 15, are both in high school, and their little sister Chantal is only 7. After losing his job as a police officer years earlier, Marcus has become an obsessed prepper, building a bunker in the backyard, stocking it with food and supplies to sustain his family for at least a year, and drilling the girls on emergency evacuations through middle-of-the-night alarms.

And yet, when the real thing comes along, none of the planning seems to matter. On the day of Aaliyah’s wedding, the family is scattered across London in various stages of getting ready. In the aftermath of destruction and chaos, alone and in groups, they must find their way back home, avoiding threats from their changed surroundings as well as from other people.

The book has an interesting storytelling approach. Chapters focus on relaying events through different family members’ experiences, and yet, Briar’s voice narrates throughout. As she explains in the opening chapter:

Almost everything I didn’t live through, I would learn later from witness reports and testimonies. I have examined everything in its entirety, more than once. Some things I can only imagine. Like my father’s expression the morning it happened.

We never forget that it’s Briar telling us the story, even as we move through third-person accounts focused on other people — so chapters may open with lines such as:

Tanice could tell it was about to happen before I did. She’d seen it more times than she cared to count.

And while Briar will share her insights during this chapter and others, the focus is on the person whose chapter it is; in this case, what Tanice did and felt and observed during these moments. We’re led to understand that all of this represents the family members’ memories, as shared with Briar at some future point.

The actual event (or the Event, as many refer to it) is terrifying and leaves utter ruin in its wake. Some pieces of society collapse immediately, while a few emergency services and official organizations seem to have been prepared in advance. The explanations related to what exactly has happened and what it represents come slowly over the course of the book; I didn’t feel that it all made sense, but I was willing to accept it for the sake of the overall story.

Not With a Bang is oddly compelling. From chapter to chapter and from character to character, I was always eager to see what might be next. A sense of danger looms over every scene. From Briar’s narration, we can rest assured that the family will survive somehow, even in the moments when this seems most questionable. After all, how could she be telling us what they all went through if she hadn’t had the opportunity in the “after” to find out?

This guarantee of the family’s safety does diminish the stakes to an extent, although that’s not to say that they come through the Event unscathed. Clearly, life will never be the same. Seeing how they all reach one another, and what they have to do to survive and overcome deadly obstacles, is what propels the reading experience forward and keeps the reader hooked until the end.

With a potential extinction-level event as the catalyst, you might expect more of a science fiction focus — but at its heart, Not With a Bang is the story of a family. Their struggles before, during, and after the Event form the narrative arc, but their interwoven dynamics — the hurts, resentments, and anger built up over all the preceding years — provide the central elements of the story. The parents’ fracturing marriage, the girls’ sense of abandonment as related to their mother’s earlier career choices, the selfish, misguided, or desperate actions of the older daughters — these are the pivot points as the narrative unfolds. The Event is the catalyst for the family members to confront their complicated relationships, come to certain realizations, and redefine themselves as they move forward.

Briar’s storyline is often frustrating, as she becomes entangled with an alien-worshipping cult who believe that the Event is a harbinger of the aliens’ arrival and turn to near-death experiences to try to make contact. While her involvement with the group starts as a way to discover the truth about a classmate’s disappearance, it becomes more complicated as she finds a sense of acceptance and belonging, and begins to question whether their beliefs could be real. She makes some truly terrible decisions, allowing the cult to pull her away from the relative safety of her family and their bunker, and puts herself in mortal danger in a way that doesn’t feel necessary.

Overall, I found Not With a Bang interesting and absorbing, but perhaps not entirely successful. Using a cataclysmic event to tell the story of a family is an inventive approach, and yet, I wished for just a bit more focus on the events themselves — digressions into the oldest daughter’s teen tennis career, for example, take up more space that seemed needed and pull focus from the family’s struggles to survive.

I’m glad to have read Not With a Bang, despite the elements that dragged the story down for me. The narrative style and voice is fresh and certainly different from other apocalyptic books that I’ve read. The story may not satisfy fans of hard science fiction, but readers looking for a character-focused story with a world-changing disaster as a catalyst will find plenty to appreciate and savor.

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