The Dog Stars

Nine years after a flu and a blood disease killed most of the world, Hig lives in a hangar at a small abandoned airport in Erie, Colorado, with his dog Jasper and his only neighbor, the heavily armed survivalist Bangley. His wife is gone and so are his friends. He flies the perimeter in a 1956 Cessna to scout for intruders, and slips off to the mountains to fish and pretend things are the way they used to be.

Then a voice comes through his radio, broken by static, and it stirs a hope that some version of his old life still exists beyond the airport. Hig sets out to follow the signal, past the point where he has enough fuel to get home. What he finds in the people he meets, and in himself, is both better and worse than he imagined.

Peter Heller's debut, published by Knopf in 2012, is narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a steady aim and a heart that refuses to harden. It is a post-apocalyptic novel that is as much about grief, friendship and the natural world as about survival. It is both savagely funny and achingly sad.