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“Z for Zachariah is an easy book to pitch. Nuclear war devastates everything, apart from the isolated valley where a teenage girl lives with her family. When her family leave to go and see what has happened in the local town, they do not come back, so she believes she’s now totally alone, maybe the last person on the planet. The book is written in the form of diary entries, and we join her as she watches a smoke trail get closer and closer over the landscape. As the smoke trail gets closer, she sees it’s a man in a hazmat suit. If A is for Adam, then Z is for Zachariah: this is the last man. And she’s, potentially, the last girl. The sentences are simple, but it has this inevitability. It’s like a heartbeat getting faster. It’s a perfectly formed story with a real sense of pace and dread and fear. And, once again, it’s speaks to a broader sense of what it means to be alive. What does it mean to be the last person?” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee, Novelist
