The End of the World Running Club: The ultimate race against time post-apocalyptic thriller

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There was something wrong with the silence, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Even though it was early on a Sunday, it was not usually this quiet. Something was missing. A normal fellow finds himself a country and an apocalypse away from his family, with time running out. What will one person do to fix the mistakes of the past and have a chance at a future? He says this so many times he sounds like a broken record. I guess this is supposed to endear readers to him, to make us think "Wow, he hates to exercise so much but he's willing to run all those miles to get to his family, he must love them." I leaped up the steps and through the kitchen, up the stairs and into Alice’s room. My heart thumped in my throat. Everything was eerily quiet after the noise. The dog had stopped. Alice had stopped. I thought this was just going to be an average book but it was really quite good. Ed is whiney and mostly useless, and if this were a real apocalypse he would probably be one of the first to die (probably because someone killed his whiney ass) but he and his unlikely friends do alright. Well, not really...a few die, Ed is maimed, and his wife leaves on the boat without him but Ed learned some valuable life lessons...which may have been more useful to him before the world ended but better late than never.

The End of the World Running Club Series - Goodreads

Along the way they encounter some very difficult circumstances. Being at the army base they have been pretty shielded from the worst of it. Once they leave they see what has really become of the country, and its citizens. They have all had to do things to survive. Bad things. Violent things. Selfish things. None of them have lasted this long without acquiring some taint on their souls. Now for the grumbles... I wasn't always on board with the depictions of the other survivors Ed came across along the way. I'm not saying it's impossible, but there were quite a number of survivors (Gloria and Jenny Rae, for two) that couldn't remember the word "asteroids," were admittedly pretty uneducated and operating at a more primeval and ruthless level of being, yet were not only surviving, but were surviving rather successfully and suspiciously intelligently! Gloria lured in, trapped, robbed, and killed other survivors while pregnant and nursing, yet she could barely tell East from West? And Jenny Rae was running an entire community with an iron fist! I mean, she was awesome in her own way, but where were the successful Hendersons, the smart and sociopathic survivors? I just would have liked to see a few of those. I'm not sure if the Hamiltons (the pig farmers) really count, but they were appropriately creepy. In an age full of streaming news, changing politics, and constant stimulation how do you envision the world reacting to the announcement of impending doom, and how would you prepare yourself? The end is a perfect combination of victory and sadness. A way to resolve a story such as this without coming out too optimistic is difficult and I do appreciate that Adrian J. Walker resisted the urge to tie it all in a bow.This book is as much about the world ending and the things people will do to survive as it is about Edgar's battle with his own personal demons. He is constantly assaulted with his own shame and failure as a person. If only he had been better. If only he had helped out more. If only he didn't spend every evening scoffing a bottle of wine. If only he'd been prepared.

The End of the World Running Club - Penguin Books UK

It was Saturday afternoon, the day before it happened. I was badly hungover from after-work beers and we were at Cheeky Monkeys, probably the worst place to find yourself in such a state. Cheeky Monkeys was a vast indoor soft-play arena of gigantic foam climbing frames, nets, plastic slides and—most notably—children. But then shit goes down. It's one thing after the other - and as most fans of post-apoc fiction will admit, we kind of like that sort of thing. Having the SHTF is a good thing in these kinds of stories. When two of the men betray them and abscond with their only vehicle, Ed decides to make the last several hundred miles by running. On the sofa, I plugged the milk bottle into Arthur’s mouth with one hand and found the remote with the other. I stopped. Man caves. Sheds, garages, studies, attics, cellars. Places for “men”—or at least their twenty-first- century equivalents—to hide. To tinker, potter, be creative, build things, hammer bits of wood, listen to the music that their families hate. Drink, smoke, look at pornography, masturbate. The subtext of the man cave, of course, is that men don’t want to spend any time with their families. For some reason this is perfectly acceptable; every man deserves his cave.I’m not saying I thought it was a good thing, and I’m not saying I thought it wasn’t tragic. I’m just saying I thought we had it coming. We’d had it coming for a long time.