Recommendations from our site
“The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical. One review I read talked about it having a haiku-like quality. It has these clipped sentences, in a way that feels hyper-realistic to how minds think. It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing.” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee, Novelist
In Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars—a novel set in the aftermath of a super-flu that has killed more than 99% of the world’s population—we meet Hig, a man who lives with his dog and an angry, armed neighbour at an abandoned airport. The Dog Stars was first published in 2012, when it became a bestseller in the US, but this brutal but ultimately hopeful narrative found a second-wave audience during the Covid-19 lockdowns. The novelist Rosa Rankin-Gee recommended it to us as one of the best near-future dystopian novels, noting: “The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical… It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing.”
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