Earth Abides

Isherwood Williams, a graduate student at Berkeley, spends time alone in the mountains and returns to find that a sudden plague has killed nearly everyone. He drives across the country and back, looking for what remains of the world he left.

Ish settles in the Bay Area with a dog and a partner named Em. Other survivors drift toward them, and the growing group comes to call itself the Tribe.

Published in 1949, the novel follows Ish across decades. Cities decay, wild growth takes back the streets, and children born after the plague have little use for the knowledge the old world left behind. The story stays with Ish's point of view throughout.

The book won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951 and holds a place as a landmark of post-apocalyptic science fiction. Its pace is quiet and patient, measured in years rather than days. The question it turns on is what a community keeps and what it lets go, while one man keeps trying to rebuild.