Afterland was published in 2020 but the book was planned and written before any of us had heard of Covid and it's interesting to read a novel about a pandemic during a pandemic, although the pandemic in Afterland is of a much worse kind, it kills most of the men in the world.
Many feminists like to tell us about how much better the world would be without any men in it but the world depicted in Afterland is a very dark place. There are a few surviving men and they are mostly rounded up and kept in compounds "for their own safety" while the virus is studied. Women fill all the roles previously assigned to men and are forbidden from falling pregnant so there is a huge black market in sperm. The plot of Afterland revolves around a woman and her son that are interned in an isolation centre in the USA to be studied after he's found to be immune to the virus that killed most other men and boys.
The woman is desperate to get back to South Africa and then her sister turns up at the centre with a plan to get them all out. What she doesn't know is that her sister has a plan to sell her son to some human trafficking female gangsters. She escapes from the internment centre with her son, who is dressed as a girl, after she beats her sister unconscious with a tyre iron after her sister drugs them and attempts to steal her son.
A very frightening road trip through a dystopian world follows, on the run from everyone with some comical and bizarre encounters while mother and son both try to make their way through a very dangerous world.
The verdict: Highly recommended
I read almost half of the book at a Department of Home Affairs office where we had to wait outside in the blistering sun for 6 hours because of covid regulations and the office operating at half speed because not fully staffed, again, due to covid regulations, to get fingerprinted for a new ID card, so that I can continue trading cryptos as a major source of income in a post-covid world. I really could relate to the ugly dystopia depicted in the book.