Recommendations from our site
“Riddley Walker is one of those books that awoke in me a total fascination with dystopian and post-apocalyptic titles. It is set a couple of thousand years in the future, following a nuclear war, and is written in an imagined dialect that has evolved after the collapse of civilisation. The main character, Riddley, is the narrator and his account of discovering and trying to make sense of an attempt to recreate a powerful weapon from an earlier time makes for a riveting read.” Read more...
Forgotten 20th-Century Classic Books
Rebeka Russell, Publisher
“The book is set in this futuristic version of Kent, which has turned into an archipelago. As you mentioned, it’s written in a kind of English that has gone through a process of ruination similar to the environment he describes. Everywhere, people are like the scavengers of Roman Britain. They are picking through the ruins of a past civilisation—picking part train carriages and things for the metal to reuse. In this world of rusted metal and deteriorated landscape, language itself is also coming apart. Sometimes it is barely recognisable.” Read more...
The best books on The End of the World
Paul Cooper, Historian
“The joy of Riddley Walker is that it’s a fully realized universe and it never lets up – it’s very, very difficult all the way through….Riddley Walker is one of those books I don’t remember those sorts of things about – all I remember is the horror. The horror of the language and the fires and the lost-ness and the violence. They run through it the whole time.” Read more...
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, Novelist
“Everyone is speaking in a kind of eccentric, quasi-Chaucerian idiom. That is what I really liked about it – the unfamiliarity of the language because it is set in this post-apocalyptic world.” Read more...
James Miller, Literary Scholar
