So you’ve just binged The Last of Us on HBO. (You haven’t yet? Borrow our Roku sticks and watch it without the HBO subscription cost!) To hold you over before season two, try these somber post-apocalyptic stories where survivors journey to understand the new world and, perhaps, to reclaim it.
A little girl who is detained by the military, restrained in a wheelchair, and goes to school while heavily guarded doesn’t truly understand why she is special until it is up to her to save the world.
A father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains must reckon with the ghosts of their past.
Performing menial duties at an animal testing laboratory to pay her way through college, 30-year-old Zoe discovers that she is pregnant at the same time the world is shattered by an apocalyptic viral outbreak that wipes out everyone she loves and genetically mutates humanity’s survivors.
A tale set in an anarchic near-future America of mountaintop colonies surrounded by rising oceans finds an independent woman trading for supplies and information about the daughter who was stolen from her eight years earlier.
When her little sister is afflicted by a bizarre sleepwalking disorder that begins to affect people all across the country, Shana is embroiled in an apocalyptic epidemic involving a decadent rock star, a religious radio host, and a disgraced scientist.
Apocalypse grips the earth; wildlife has disappeared; and starvation prevails. Amidst this bleak backdrop, a man and his young son slowly make their way toward the coast. Avoiding roves of marauding cannibals and fighting off starvation, they gain hope and stamina in knowing they are some of the remaining few virtuous people.
The latest test subject in a covert government experiment, abandoned six-year-old Amy is rescued by an FBI agent who hides them in the Oregon hills, from which Amy emerges a century later to save the human race from a terrifying virus.
Surviving a pandemic disease that has killed everyone he knows, a pilot establishes a shelter in an abandoned airport hangar before hearing a random radio transmission that compels him to risk his life to seek out other survivors.
Moving back and forth in time–from an actor’s early days as a film star to twenty years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains–this elegiac novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people.
This blog post was created by librarians from Park City Library with help of information found in NoveList – a database which is free with your library card. NoveList is a comprehensive reading recommendation resource.