Z for Zachariah

"So this was the book that kind of started it all for me. After I read it, I tied a rope to the radiator in my bedroom so I could escape out of the window, and I had a Karrimor rucksack ready to go at all times— Exactly. Except it had, like, a single pair of underwear and a can of beans in it. But there was this feeling that something might happen, and you need to be ready. I talked about that before—the teetering feeling of fear and hope and agency… catnip to a young teenager. Z for Zachariah is an easy book to pitch. Nuclear war devastates everything, apart from the isolated valley where a teenage girl lives with her family. When her family leave to go and see what has happened in the local town, they do not come back, so she believes she’s now totally alone, maybe the last person on the planet. The book is written in the form of diary entries, and we join her as she watches a smoke trail get closer and closer over the landscape. As the smoke trail gets closer, she sees it’s a man in a hazmat suit. If A is for Adam, then Z is for Zachariah: this is the last man. And she’s, potentially, the last girl. I started flicking through this book again just before we spoke and I felt like I wanted to be back in this world straight away. Often when you come to a book as a teenager, reading it again as an adult you can feel disappointed. But this is very well done. The sentences are simple, but it has this inevitability. It’s like a heartbeat getting faster. It’s a perfectly formed story with a real sense of pace and dread and fear. And, once again, it’s speaks to a broader sense of what it means to be alive. What does it mean to be the last person? That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now , the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes. As I was saying before, I think the best dystopias are really well-judged games of distraction. You’re not always told: this is what’s happening. It’s just happening around you. These two novels are really superb examples of something simultaneously calibrated to the YA audience, and the adult audience. And in the pared-down nature of the story—of it being one girl against these huge world events—something very illuminating and compelling happens. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my book too: there’s a 16-year-old narrator and it’s about her infinitely personal route through huge political and climatic events. I think people have either leaned in or leaned out. Some people couldn’t think of anything they wanted to do less than watch something pandemic-related during the pandemic. But I was the opposite. I even watched Outbreak , which, frankly, is a terrible film. So I think it just depends. Another thing about all these books is that they will be sure to satiate people who love dystopian novels, but I also think they are excellent enough to reel anyone in. Even those who ‘don’t do dystopia’. They are superb novels in and of themselves."