Metro 2033 — Dmitry Glukhovsky

 

The year is 2033, the world has been reduced to rubble, and humanity is nearly extinct, half-destroyed cities having become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms -- mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. A few score thousand human survivors live on in the Moscow Metro -- the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters -- or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, and feelings have given way to instinct -- the most important of which is survival, at any price. VDNKh, the northernmost inhabited station on its line, remains secure -- but now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. In his hands he holds the future of his native station, the Metro, and perhaps the whole of humanity.