The new hunger

The world has already been failing for years when the dead start to rise. War, social collapse, freak storms and rising seas have left humanity close to the edge, and the walking corpses finish what those disasters began.

Three separate stories run side by side. Julie is twelve and has known nothing but this ruined world. She rides with her parents across the wastelands of America, looking for somewhere to live. Nora is sixteen and hungry. Her parents have left her and her little brother in the half-empty ruins of Seattle, and she is now the only person looking after him.

The third thread follows a dead man who wakes in a forest. He has a red tie and the letter R, and nothing else to tell him who or what he is. Before he can solve that, he must learn to think and to walk, and to deal with the hunger that drives him.

This is post-apocalyptic horror with a bleak, bloody tone, and it works as a prequel to the zombie love story Warm Bodies. It shows Julie and R's lives before they meet.