The Blue Book of Nebo
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Prize-winner in three categories of the 2019 Wales Book of the Year Award, The Blue Book of Nebo paints a spellbinding and eerie picture of society’s collapse, and the relationships that persist after everything as we know it disappears. After nuclear disaster, Rowenna and her young son are among the rare survivors in rural north-west Wales. Left alone in their isolated hillside cottage, after others have died or abandoned the towns and villages, they must learn new skills in order to remain alive. With no electricity or modern technology they must return to the old ways of living off the land, developing new personal resources.
While they become more skilled and stronger, the relationship between mother and son changes in subtle ways, as Dylan must take on adult responsibilities, especially once his baby sister Mona arrives. Despite their close understanding, mother and son have their own secrets, which emerge as in turn they jot down their thoughts and memories in a found notebook. As each reflects on their old life and the events since the disaster which has brought normal, twenty-first century life to an end, The Blue Book of Nebo becomes a collective confidante, representing the future of their people and a new history to live by.
In this prize-winning and best-selling new novel, Manon Steffan Ros not only explores the human capacity to find new strengths when faced with the need to survive, but also the structures and norms of the contemporary world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ros (The Seasoning) delivers a spare and intimate story of a family surviving a near-future global apocalypse. Rowenna, 36, supplies her 14-year-old son, Dylan, with a notebook she found in the nearby Welsh village of Nebo, and in it they take turns writing stories of what's happened since "The End"—which began eight years earlier with reports of bombings of major cities in the U.S. and U.K. They grow vegetables and trap rabbits for food, and Dylan and his two-year-old sister, Mona, keep a mutated hare as a pet. Dylan feels unnerved after realizing he doesn't know how Rowenna came to be pregnant with Mona, given that everyone else had either fled, joined mutually annihilating gangs, or died in their homes from the fallout of a nuclear power plant explosion shortly after The End. Rowenna writes of both children's fathers, sharing stories of human weakness and grace. Ros's restrained, slow drip of details about the outer world feels plausible and horrifying, and Dylan's interest in the Welsh language ("that weird ll sound, like air escaping from the sides of the tongue"), which Rowenna has largely forgotten, engenders both poignancy and hope. In a time rife with and ripe for stories of the end, this one stands out.
