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 Audible Original Fiction by Mark Tufo

https://www.audible.com

An EMP from some kind of sun storm knocks out all technology on planet earth at the beginning of this story and the reader learns about it from three different perspectives in three different areas of the USA. It’s a serious post apocalyptic world in every place. 

This book started out exciting and I really loved the characters, but it was just so DARK. It got awful. There is a sequel, but no thanks! I can’t sit through any more of the hopelessness of evil humanity. It was well written but terribly so. 

I also listened to recently from Audible Originals: The Break Up Artist

The Book of Flora

 Fiction by Meg Elison

https://www.audible.com

This is the last book in the "Road to Nowhere" Series (see below). It was a good conclusion to the series, in that it wrapped everything up pretty well while producing some surprises at the end. Still, it was kind of sad to me; I liked the characters of Flora and Etta a lot and really wanted them to end up happier.

I suppose it's hard to have a happy ending in a post-apocalyptic world...

I also read by this author in this series: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and The Book of Etta

The Book of Etta

 Fiction by Meg Elison

https://www.audible.com

This book is the sequel to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. It continues the story of the post-apocalyptic world where the population had been almost wiped out about a hundred years before by a plague that still threatens the human race, especially the women.

The city of Nowhere, the place where the Unnamed Midwife had taken refuge, is surviving, but there are at least ten men for every woman still. Women who have borne a living child are revered, but many still die in childbed fever. Raiders from Nowhere go out to find Old World goods, and to rescue women and girls from slave traders around the country, and Etta is one of those raiders.

This was an exciting continuation of the tale begun in the first book. The story does get darker and more brutal though. There is one more book in the series that I plan to listen to next.

I also read by this author: Find Layla

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

 Fiction by Meg Elison

https://www.audible.com

After a terrible plague wipes out almost the whole human population, killing 95% of men and 99% of women, the Unnamed Midwife of this story has lost everyone and everything she knows, including her profession. 

This was an engrossing story with a unique voice. I've read other post-apocalyptic stories, and even several with the "virus-kills-almost-all-women" idea, but this one may be the best.

The Chaos Walking Trilogy

The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men 

Fiction by Patrick Ness. 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Todd Hewitt lives in a world where dogs talk. (Although, as he points out, the problem with that is that dogs don't really have much to say.) In fact, every animal talks: sheep, frogs, even bugs! Or, more accurately, all the animals broadcast their thoughts out loud. Unfortunately, this means the thoughts of men are also audible, and that makes for constant Noise in Todd's village of Prentisstown that is hard to endure.

I say "the thoughts of men" because, in Prentisstown, there are no women. Todd's mother, along with every other woman, was killed by a plague twelve years ago that also wiped out half of the men. It was this same sickness, a result of a germ released during the Great War, that caused everyone's thoughts to manifest themselves aloud.

Or at least, that's what Todd has been taught. But is all of it true? As Todd approaches his thirteenth birthday, the date when he, the last boy in Prentisstown, will become a man, he begins to learn that things may not be the way he has always thought they were.

This was an exciting book series that held a lot of surprises. 

The Rampart Trilogy

 Fiction by M.R. Carey

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/ book2/ book3

This is a three-book series set in the post-apocalyptic future. (It's a different end-of-the-world scenario than the one Mr. Carey detailed in The Girl With All the Gifts. It seems this guy can think of many different ways for society to collapse in upon itself.)

Koli is a young man in a small place called Mythen Rood, living three hundred years after the Unfinished War killed millions and scattered the survivors. Aged almost fifteen, Koli is hoping to be chosen as a Rampart, the select group of people who both rule and defend his village by means of the few pieces of tech they command. But when the time of choosing comes, he is surprised by the outcome.

These books were absorbing to read; I liked them a lot!

I also read by this author: Fellside

The Girl With All the Gifts

 Fiction by M.R. Carey

https://www.audible.com

The story begins with Melanie, who is being held in a military-run secure facility with twenty-five or so other kids, each in a separate cell. Are they being studied, or educated, or just imprisoned? And why do the captors seem almost afraid of the prisoners?

This book was not at all what I expected, and it was great!!

I also read by this author: Fellside

The Last She

 Audible Original Fiction by H.J. Nelson

https://www.audible.com

Three years ago a terrible plague wiped out almost everyone on earth, starting with all the females. There are some surviving men, almost all under thirty, many of whom are banding together in clans for survival.

But for some unknown reason, there is one young woman still alive, hence the title. Ara has been living in the forest with her father, avoiding all the groups of men, because of course they are dangerous to her. Until she is left alone and gets captured....

The story started out really good and I liked the characters a lot at first. As it went on, however, things got more and more implausible. Maybe because this book is aimed at the YA market, particularly at young women, it shied away from realistically portraying how very dark a future that this scenario would make. 

This author would have us believe that these scarred men --who had seen the collapse of civilization and endured the death of almost everyone they had loved-- would greet the discovery of a surviving woman with awe and hope, and treat Ara kindly and respectfully. I highly doubt this. 

Plus Ara herself was a difficult character; she vacillated between tough-girl and damsel-in-distress with dizzying rapidity, and she just kept making poor decisions that managed to get other people --but never herself!-- killed.

I'm giving this a thumbs-up for generally holding my attention, but when I got to the end I was ready to be done with these unrealistic characters. Then I realized that the author was setting up for a sequel! No thanks...

I also listened to recently by audible originals: Young Rich Widows