Refuge
It is twelve years on from a global plague. John Suter believes himself the sole survivor. He has gradually come to terms with his fate and has settled into a steady and self-reliant daily routine. One morning he finds a mutilated body in the river near his house. In his terror, Suter knows he has no choice but to investigate. What he discovers upstream stretches his endurance to its limits and forces him to reassess not only his own humanity, but also his place within the human family he had once believed extinct.
er. The victim's head would be held under the surface until he began to drown.
They were approaching the riverside ash-tree.
"Seumas."
"Yes?"
"Do you believe the tarot is truly puissant?"
"Of ... of course," Seumas said. "It's the Book of Thoth." Had Bex not told him so?
Yesterday evening Bex had again performed a divination, which Seumas had, naturally enough, attended. During it, their fingertips had made momentary contact, and in that moment, it now seemed to Seumas, a faint but special sort of tingle had been exchanged.
In the candlelight, on the scuffed surface of the long table in the dining hall, Bex had placed ten cards in a pattern. The sixth card, to the left of the significator and its cross, had happened to lie directly in front of Seumas. According to Bex, the sixth card indicated what was to happen in the very near future. That card had been the Moon, eighteenth of the Major Arcana. It showed a dog and a wolf, standing at the water's edge
Reviews
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Well, first off, I really enjoyed the story as a whole. It was interesting, kept me thinking and I did want to keep reading the entire time.
There was only one problem with this great story! I don't know if it has anything to do with it being a British book or not. Perhaps people in Britain can read the occasional huge words he used. I am a medical student, and I had to keep my dictionary handy for some of the amazing words, a few of which my dictionary did not have. That is okay for lots of people, I am sure but I don't think everyone can handle that. In the United States, most books are written on the sixth grade level, unless they are science, textbooks, or something educational. This is so everyone can read it. I just loved the story but wow!
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of smart people here, but I don't think most would want to look things up while they are trying to get into a book. We like immediate satisfaction and quick understanding of the story lines. Also, it has a lot of homosexual descriptions in it and some rape of women. I just want you to know, in case you are triggered by things like that. It could bother sensitive readers who are uncomfortable with rape. I will tell you though, it is a good story. The author really knows his stuff. You can tell he is an intelligent person! Check it out if you aren't bothered by some of what I said. It will be worth it!
Another winner from this wonderful and under-rated author. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed "The Penal Colony", I decided to read this and was not disappointed.
Herley beautifully creates situations in which to explore alternate moralities using succinctly defined and plausible characters.
A book which compels the reader from beginning to end.
AMAZING BOOK!!!! very well written. good details. very good charactors that seem very real and important to the story.
it takes place in the near future where there is a huge disease going around that killed many. there are very few surviors left. there is one village who trys to kill and rape everyone. doesnt sound like a great book but once you get into it, it goes with the story. so... READ IT!!!! :) i promise you wont regret reading it, its an amazing book!!!
After reading The Penal Colony and really enjoying that, I knew I wanted to read more by this author. This book pulls you right in and has excellent character development. Intense and very interesting viewpoints for this type of post apocalyptic scenario.
Excellent, fast moving story. Very interesting twist on the post-apocalyptic story.
great read!
Fast-paced with an accessible protagonist. I was impressed enough to donate a bit of change on the author's website in return for making this excellent work freely available to readers.
When this novel first came to my attention, I was excited, since Richard Herley had already authored one of my favorite books, the outstanding The Penal Colony. Then, when I read the blurb and realized what Refuge was about, I admit my excitement faltered a bit. I felt the post-apocalyptic, I'm-the-last-man-on-Earth survival milieu had already been pretty well strip-mined in a hundred works ranging from I Am Legend to Children of Men to The Stand, and I thought it would be difficult for an author to come along in 2008 and give the genre a treatment that was anything other than derivative and tired.
Happily, I was wrong. Herley immediately puts his stamp on the proceedings, much as he does in his other works, with concise, economical detail, great pacing, and a level of research and thinking-through that leaves the reader wondering why other novelists didn’t think of these things. His chops as a writer are simply amazing - several wide cuts above the average writer of popular fiction. Several themes from Herley’s other works are revisited here, most notably the villains’ Christian/Satanic delusions and the protagonists’ struggles for survival in a wild, uncaring natural world, but it’s a very different novel to The Penal Colony.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you like brainy, propulsive thrillers with characters who are complex, flawed and not always easy to love, this is the book for you. And as the book is available for free download (with donations accepted via the honor system) on Feedbooks, Manybooks, or his own website, www.richardherley.com, there’s no excuse not to.
Gripping. Loved it!
Wonderful! A grand adventure.
great!
