Tag: dystopian fiction

The fight for survival has begun.

All-out war spins out of control, and it doesn’t discriminate. Governments fall, continents are obliterated, deadly viruses consume everything in their path, and what’s left of humanity is on the run. Caught in this global refugee crisis are a few unlikely survivors.

Tony, a philandering London lawyer, escapes the doomed city and his own murky past as he evacuates to the continent.

A hapless flock of Belgian nuns prays for a miracle as they watch their city turn to rubble.

Bella, a naïve teenager, thinks she is going on holiday when her father drags her across the globe to New Zealand.

Reggie, a loyal employee of a mining corporation, guards a hoard of diamonds in the African plains, fending off desperate looters.

Alyosha, a nuclear scientist, has been looking for the God-particle in Siberia, but now the world is at an end, he wishes to return home to Chernobyl.

A pair of orphaned children are cowering in the Tatra Mountains, fearing the sky will fall in on them.

Will they find an escape route before it is too late? Or are they doomed to fail?

AmazonAnna Legat is a Wiltshire-based author, best known for her DI Gillian Marsh murder mystery series. A globe-trotter and Jack-of-all-trades, Anna has been an attorney, legal adviser, a silver-service waitress, a school teacher and a librarian. She read law at the University of South Africa and Warsaw University, then gained teaching qualifications in New Zealand. She has lived in far-flung places all over the world where she delighted in people-watching and collecting precious life experiences for her stories. Anna writes, reads, lives and breathes books and can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction.

My thoughts:

This was a really good end of the world book. A disparate group of people, spread out across the globe somehow survive the nuclear bombs and falling meteorites, finding shelter where they can and trying to stay alive; they connect via long haul radio waves. Each section tells the story of one group, bringing the all out war and chaos from every corner of the globe.

There’s tragedy, but also humour to be found amidst the ongoing fallout and this is the first in what promises to be an enjoyable series (I hope!).

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

IN THE END OF THE WORLD RUNNING CLUB EDGAR HILL RAN 550 MILES AFTER AN APOCALYPSE TO TRY AND FIND HIS FAMILY. HE HAD IT EASY. THIS IS HIS WIFE’S STORY.

Beth Hill has survived the apocalypse with a baby and toddler in tow. And what’s more she’s done it alone – without her husband’s help. He’s never been any help. But when disaster strikes and someone steals her kids, she knows what she has to do. The new world might be very different: no government, no law, no infrastructure and a whole lot more ocean than there used to be. But one thing hasn’t changed – the lengths a mother will go to save her family…

Adrian J Walker was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the mid ‘70s. After his father found a camper van in a ditch, he renovated it and moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised. Ever since he can remember, Adrian has been interested in three things: words, music and technology, and when he graduated from the University of Leeds, he found a career in software. His novel The End of the World Running Club, a post-apocalyptic running fable about hope, love and endurance, was a Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club choice. He lives in Aberdeen with his wife and two children.

My thoughts:

I haven’t read the previous book in this series but I didn’t feel hugely like I needed to have done in order to read this book.

Beth is a slightly irritating character, or at least I found her to be so at the beginning, it’s only when it all goes horribly wrong and she has to find some allies and actually do something that I grew to like her a little.

I really loved certain bits of this book, like the floating garbage dump that had become a home for some of the survivors that Beth encounters.

Bits of the book are quite dark and violent, like pretty much any post-apocalyptic narrative. But there are little moments of humour and levity throughout.

From the way the book ends I imagine there’s going to be another in this series, it’ll be interesting to see which character steers the plot from this point.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.