Riddley Walker

Russell Hoban 1980

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
dystopian philosophical survival loss

Our Take

Set two thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse in a devolved England, written in a degraded English that is itself a record of what was lost. Hoban's language is the devastation — you feel civilisation's absence in every sentence's mutation. The most formally radical post-apocalyptic novel ever written. Every devolved word is a small funeral for what the language used to be able to say.

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