There's just one woman, collecting people's stories and telling her own. It's not flashy, it's not romantic, and there is no chosen one. (1982- ) US author whose first novel was The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), a particularly grim Dystopia whose precipitating Disaster is the rapid onslaught of an autoimmune disease that kills most men and almost all women and children. This book is an ideal accompaniment to films like Children of Men or books like The Handmaid's Tale. It doesn't dwell on any of the assaults, but rather expects the reports of the women in the book to be enough for the stories to be believed. Given the prevalence of sexual assault and slavery in the world, it was refreshing that the narrative just believes them. It is the first novel in The Road to Nowhere Trilogy.

This novel is the winner of the Philip K Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, my super queer post-apocalyptic tale of what happens when everyone loses their reproductive rights (heh), is 1.99 on Kindle. It doesn't pull its punches, but neither did it leave me feeling hollowed out by the experience of reading. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is post-apocalyptic feminist novel written by American author Meg Elison, published in 2014 by Sybaritic Press. A postapocalyptic landscape ravaged by plague, with few men, even fewer women, and stillborn children the norm, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife does its worldbuilding with short, blunt descriptions and the experiences of people trying to survive within that world.

I still don't know if this is a book to be enjoyed so much as it is a book to be experienced.

The unnamed midwife