Last Ones Left Alive

Last Ones Left Alive
By Sarah Davis-Goff

The apocalypse has come again in Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive. This time we are in Ireland, where a plague has turned most of the population into bloodthirsty zombies called skrake. After the death of her mom, our hero Orpen leaves her island sanctuary and hits the road, pushing her mother’s dying partner Maeve in a wheelbarrow. Readers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will see something familiar in this.

Orpen’s goal is to make it to Dublin, where she can hook up with a gang of lethal ladies known as the banshee. The odds might be long, but fortunately Orpen’s parents have provided her with a practical education in the martial arts, turning her into a butt-kicking, knife-throwing force to be reckoned with. Still, the road is thick with danger.

The post-collapse wasteland is, of course, well-traveled ground by now. But Davis-Goff gives it a spark with her lively descriptions of hand-to-hand combat and feminist true grit.