Riddley Walker

This novel is set in a Kent reduced to iron-age farmsteads and itinerant puppet shows many generations after a nuclear war. Riddley, a twelve-year-old who succeeds his father as the settlement's connexion man, tells the story in a broken, phonetic English. After a killing connected to the remnant technology called 1 Big 1, he leaves Howedown and crosses a landscape of ruins, packs, and the wandering Eusa show, a Punch-and-Judy ritual that encodes a distorted memory of the bomb. Power, charisma, and the wish to recover lost knowledge drive the adults he meets. The book is a first-person quest through a language as ruined as the country.

By Dr Rowan Williams. 14″ × 10″.