Brutal, poetic, and harrowing - this is very grown up horror indeed. If I hadn't already read The Road, which is a similar post-apocalyptic journey across another shattered landscape, with another desperate father, I would have enjoyed it more. There's no mimicry intended, and the final third of the book steers a sharp left into freakier territory than The Road allows itself, but it's a little unfortunate. That said, this is highly accomplished stuff, more than enough to make me seek out more no...

Other reviewers on Amazon covered the plotline very well, so there is no need for me to rehash. This book, as one of the other reviewers said, WAS depressing, but that was the point. It was different in that there was a twist to the why/how of the "zombies". I won't spoil it for you. The story was good, dark, lonely and distant. Jane's love for his son, who could not have possibly survived, is what keeps him going for TEN YEARS. It, as someone else said, really IS kind of like The Road, but not

This story is heartwarming, in a weird way. A father on his way to see his boy, when almost all in the world is dead.I realized that this post apocalyptic stories interests me. Seeing how the people try to survive after the civilization got almost wiped out.It is the first of its kind that i have read and so i enjoyed it a lot! I imagine this to be good if turned into a tv show. Highly recommend but watch out for the gore.

Conrad Williams‘ The Unblemished was one of my favourite books of 2008; sadly, his new novel, One, doesn’t reach the heights of that earlier work — but it’s an interesting read with some very fine moments nevertheless.The novel is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Richard Jane is a saturation diver working on an oil platform off the coast of Aberdeen, when the apocalypse occurs. Eventually making his way back to land, Jane’s only thought is to travel

Conrad Williams is a good writer; that said, I thought the development of the book was disappointing. There are two distinct stories here. The first half of the book has a theme of world catastrophe, which was very well done. The second half is a scifi/horror book that becomes increasingly morbid, dark, and with unclear focus. Overall, the characters were not well developed, and there was excessive emphasis on the solitary sufferings of the hero, with little else to balance the story.

(This is a somewhat edited version of an e-mail I sent a few friends after first reading it. --v)This one’s a postapocalyptic SFF novel about a deep-sea diver in the North Sea (present day) who's fixing the leg of an oil rig, feels a tremor, and comes up to find the world all scorched and pretty much everything dead in grisly fashion. He then sets off to make his way down the length of the UK, hoping to find his son alive in London against all odds.There are of course a lot of echoes of previous...

My favorite sub-genre of horror novel is Post-apocalypse. I love the classics like Alas Babylon and On the beach as well as more modern classics like Swan Song, The Road and the Stand. I had this one on the shelf for a long time and I’m sorry it took me so long to get to it. I know this will sound like hyperbole but One is much darker than any of those other novels even McCarthy’s the Road. Much like my experience reading Swan Song my heart hurt for the character’s experiencing the events of the...

I probably shouldn't have read this during my lunch hours as it was quite gruesome. Very enjoyable and just my sort of thing! Sometimes the writing seemed a bit repetitive though and then at other times I wasn't sure what was happening because it wasn't explained. Still great though.

The superb movie-style cover of this book tells you all you need to know about the plot going in: a man walks to London through a devastated Britain. However, it does mislead in one way - despite the tagline ("This is you. This is now. And your number is up.") the book isn't written in the second person. That was a relief.In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls noted in the entry "Holocaust and After" that: "Many of the authors cited have not been closely associated with Genre SF....

A good book, but grueling. There's only so much end of the world you can take.

Diver Richard Jane is off on a job repairing an oil rig when a mysterious cataclysm strikes seemingly reducing the world’s population (or at least England’s) to a bare handful of people. Escaping his remote location Jane makes his way back to England hopeing and believed that his son is still alive. Along the way he wanders through the devastated landscape that provides surprisingly limited clues into the truth of what happened. Jane meets other survivors along the way and when the totality of t...

Conrad Williams, One (Virgin Books, 2009)I knew too much when I started this book, unfortunately. If you're reading this review, you probably already do as well. I say this because while the first half of the book is good, it's a different animal entire than the second half, and the final sentence of part one is one of those understated sucker punches that just works, but works so much better when you have no earthly idea it's coming. So on the off chance that you got here for some reason other

A brilliant start but went downhill with a weird ending. The closest I've come to not finishing a book.

One by Conrad Williams is about one mans journey to find his son following an apocalyptic event. The United Kingdom is a scorched and desolate place, covered with a glittering dust, rubble and corpses.The book is broken into two parts and the opening first few chapters are just pure brilliance. The pace was fast and the characters vivid. It wet my appetite for what was going to be something special, or so I thought.After the first few intense and profound chapters the pace slowed to a virtual st...

This is you. This is now. And your number is up.For reasons that are too complicated to touch upon here I have long been a fan of apocalyptic and post apocalyptic fiction. Novels about the end of the world have always sparked my imagination and over the years I have read a fair number. Some, like Swan Song by Robert McCammon, and Blood Crazy Simon Clark, I keep going back to again and again. I always look forward to reading a new example of the genre and so was happy when I finally managed to pi...

Like _The Road_, but less cheerful.

Time taken to read - 6 days Pages - 363Publisher - VirginBlurb from GoodreadsThis is no country he knows, and no place he ever wants to see, even in the shuttered madness of his worst dreams. But Richard Jane survived. He walks because he has no choice and at the end of this molten road, running along the spine of a burned, battered country, his son may be alive. The sky crawls with venomous cloud and burning rain while the land is a scorched sprawl of rubble and corpses. Rats have risen from th...

I'm not sure what to make of this.It's gritty, unforgiving and brutal. What a nightmare.But it isn't complete, I don't think. I understand that our 'hero' doesn't know what happened to cause the apocalypse, therefore we the reader don't know either, but there's more to it than that. We find out who the biggest threats are, and we're told how they came into being and what they're about. We're told what a struggle it is for humans to function and what makes things difficult to survive. We're even

Good concept but really badly written, consisting mainly in the narrator whining how much he missed his son. Action scenes very poorly describedExpected better from highly rated writer

Any book which makes me go to bed early to read it is already doing something right.This is The Road, set in Britain, but with correct use of apostrophes.Actually, that undersells it. It is its own complicated beast. But we travel with a father. Such an intense focus on one mind works for immersion, even if having an unreliable narrator sometimes irritates. It's like being inside someone else's head, wanting to control their body, to make them ask a question or look at a certain thing so you can...