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The Drowned Cities
- Narrated by: Joshua Swanson
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die.
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By: Charlie Higson
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City of Stairs
- By: Robert Jackson Bennett
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions - until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself - first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it - stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy. Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani.
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Something Different
- By Scott S. on 10-17-14
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Zombies: More Recent Dead
- By: Neil Gaiman, Carrie Vaughn, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and others
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt, Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.
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A well blended mix
- By The Lone Mopper on 07-30-15
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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Angelfall
- Penryn & the End of Days, Book 1
- By: Susan Ee
- Narrated by: Caitlin Davies
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her 17-year-old sister, Penryn, will do anything to get her back. Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel. Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl. Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival.
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Creep-tastic!
- By Bee on 09-19-12
By: Susan Ee
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Control Point
- Shadow Ops
- By: Myke Cole
- Narrated by: Corey Jackson
- Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Myke Cole is an expert at ratcheting up suspense and delivering pulse-pounding adventure that leaves audiences breathless. In Shadow Ops: Control Point, the world has seemingly gone mad. People are waking up with magical powers, such as the ability to raise the dead or call forth storms. The only thing staving off a plunge into chaos is the Supernatural Operations Corps, headed by Oscar Britton. But when Oscar exhibits a power of his own, the hunter becomes the hunted.
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get on with it
- By Eugene on 05-15-12
By: Myke Cole
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Frostbite
- A Werewolf Tale
- By: David Wellington
- Narrated by: Tai Sammons
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman lost in the hostile wastes of the Canadian north finds herself at odds with a vicious wolf. When next the moon rises what will she discover? Frostbite is a story about werewolves... though perhaps not the werewolves you're expecting.
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Very Unusual
- By decembergrit on 11-01-10
By: David Wellington
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The Mortal Tally
- By: Sam Sykes
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 24 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Cier'Djaal, once the crowning glory of the civilized world, has gone from a city to a battlefield and a battlefield to a graveyard. Foreign armies clash relentlessly on streets laden with the bodies of innocents caught in the crossfire. Cultists and thieves wage shadow wars, tribal armies foment outside the city's walls, and haughty aristocrats watch the world burn from on high. As his companions struggle to keep the city from destroying itself, Lenk travels to the Forbidden East in search of the demon who caused it all. But even as he pursues Khoth-Kapira, dark whispers plague his thoughts.
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Great Middle Entry
- By Casey on 04-15-18
By: Sam Sykes
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The Emperor's Blades
- Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, Book 1
- By: Brian Staveley
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The emperor of Annur is dead, slain by enemies unknown. His daughter and two sons, scattered across the world, do what they must to stay alive and unmask the assassins. But each of them also has a life-path on which their father set them, destinies entangled with both ancient enemies and inscrutable gods.
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4 Primary Crimes Committed By The Author
- By Captain Spanky Of Nazareth on 05-09-16
By: Brian Staveley
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Ashes
- Ashes Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Ilsa J. Bick
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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An electromagnetic pulse flashes across the sky, destroying every electronic device and killing billions. Alex hiked into the woods to say good-bye to her dead parents and her personal demons. Now desperate to find out what happened after the pulse crushes her to the ground, Alex meets up with Tom, a young soldier, and Ellie, a girl whose grandfather was killed by the EMP. For this improvised family and the others who are spared, it's now a question of who can be trusted and who is no longer human.
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No Thank You
- By KK on 06-27-12
By: Ilsa J. Bick
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Heroes Die
- The First of the Acts of Caine
- By: Matthew Stover
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 22 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned throughout the land of Ankhana as the Blade of Tyshalle, Caine has killed his share of monarchs and commoners, villains and heroes. He is relentless, unstoppable, simply the best there is at what he does. At home on Earth, Caine is Hari Michaelson, a superstar whose adventures in Ankhana command an audience of billions.
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Don't Let the Cover Turn You Off
- By Paul on 08-13-12
By: Matthew Stover
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The Remaining
- By: D. J. Molles
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In a steel-and-lead-encased bunker 20 feet below the basement level of his house, a soldier waits for his final orders. On the surface, a plague ravages the planet, infecting over 90% of the populace. The bacterium burrows through the brain, destroying all signs of humanity and leaving behind little more than base, prehistoric instincts. The infected turn into hyper-aggressive predators, with an insatiable desire to kill and feed. Someday soon, the soldier will have to open the hatch to his bunker, and step out into this new wasteland, to complete his mission....
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Die Hard Meets 28 Days Later
- By G Wallace on 01-10-14
By: D. J. Molles
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The Blue Blazes
- By: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Mookie Pearl. Criminal underworld? He runs in it. Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it. Nothing stops Mookie when he’s on the job. But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something’s gotta give....
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Was hesitant at first
- By Andrew on 07-23-13
By: Chuck Wendig
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Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women, Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.
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Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place that might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. Particularly as it’s carried though space on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown). It plays by different rules. But then, some things are the same everywhere. The Disc’s very existence is about to be threatened by a strange new blight: the world’s first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land.
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The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions - until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself - first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it - stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy. Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani.
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Something Different
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Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving, hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold. After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound to intercept an unknown intelligence.
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Gothic Horror Hard Science Fiction
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Anathem
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Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community.
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I love Neal, but Good lord... ugh!
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Stories of Your Life and Others
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Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.
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Amazing collection of short stories
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By: Ted Chiang
What listeners say about The Drowned Cities
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ryan
- 09-01-12
Another grim, gripping collapsed-world adventure
For my money, Paulo Bacigalupi is one of the few writers of dystopian science fiction right now who's not just channeling the social anomie of the moment, but is gazing out over the ramparts towards the approaching dust cloud. He asks a direct and urgent question that other novelists don't: what would happen if our fossil fuel-driven, environmental havok-wreaking global economy broke down? Would human society have to foresight to adapt, or would it just start to cannibalize itself, reverting to ugly old patterns?
Forget the Hunger Games, with its elaborate Big Brother fantasy -- The Drowned Cities (and its companion novel, Ship Breaker) portrays a more immediate kind of dystopia, a "future" that's already arrived in places like Somalia, the Congo, Iraq, or Afghanistan. It's just not a future that's gotten to our shores. Yet.
Just as importantly, Bacigalupi is a visionary who can write. His novels burn with a quiet, measured intensity, the calm of the language bringing the fear and struggle of his world to vivid life. He doesn’t give his characters easy moral choices, but puts them in a position where doing the right thing is often very dangerous, and being less-than-heroic is sometimes the only way to survive.
The Drowned Cities is a page-turningly grim novel, perhaps a shade or two more intense than it’s companion book, Ship Breaker. Here again, we meet two adolescent characters trying to keep their heads down and make it to adulthood, although not the same two characters from that book, and in a new setting -- near the flooded remnants of Washington, DC. We also have a return of the monstrous half-man, Tool, who plays a more prominent role as both a reluctant ally and a knowing but decidedly unsympathetic observer of human affairs, and is perhaps Bacigalupi’s best character to date. Here, the plot puts its protagonists squarely in the middle of a war between vicious militias of mostly-teenage conscripts, who, as we come to see, are as much victims of their circumstances as anyone else, unable to escape what their exploitative warlords have turned them into.
If that sounds like heavy material for a young adult book, it is, and I don’t know that I’d recommend this one for younger readers, given some frightening characters and scenes of brutality, torture, and enslavement. But, it is, like Ship Breaker, a very good book, framing its moral questions in a sober, even-handed way, and keeping the level of action high. I’m pleased to see that the economy required for shorter works has improved Bacigalupi’s chops at plot and characterization, and look forward to seeing him return to writing grown-up novels with those lessons in hand.
PS. If you haven’t read Ship Breaker, it’s not really a prerequisite, but I’d still suggest that one first, since it introduces Tool and is a bit more of an adventure.
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17 people found this helpful
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- colleen
- 05-20-12
A little better than mediocre
This is a dystopian tale filled with the strong praying on the weak. The violence and intent of some of the characters is disturbing. Included in the story is a man beast that makes it a little more interesting but really adds little to the final product. I listened to the entire thing but it's not one I'll come back to.
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- Tracy
- 01-17-13
Better than Shipbreaker
I found Shipbreaker a bit of an anticlimax, but loved this. So did my husband (45), son (18), & daughter (15). Subject matter was gritty but beautifully written with a well-paced plot and engaging characters - didn't feel preachy or too earnest at all, though it did have a social "message" about humanity (& man's inhumanity to man), and the narrator did a fabulous job.
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- Margit D. Morawietz
- 06-03-12
Companion to 'Shipbreaker'
In this story, set in the same future earth as P B's earlier novel 'Shipbreaker', the world economy has fractured, the global seat of power shifted to China, and the former US has descended into barbarism, where religious gangs, gathered around warlords, perpetuate unimaginable violence. P B has obviously taken many current events, from global warming to civil wars in Africa and crafted a plausible and intricate future. As in 'Shipbreaker this world is viewed from the eyes of young adults struggling to survive and make sense out of the chaos,brutality and remnants of former greatness. If you enjoy suspenseful journey novels & dystopian novels then you might enjoy this one. I admire the authors ability to project current realities into the future and his ability to create scenarios that are detailed, original and plausible.[ see Greer's 'Ecotechnic Future' where Greer names the next step to be a ' Scavenger society' ]
I am not sure that this is a novel to let younger readers get into though. Again, as in previous novels, the author describes terrible violence in graphic detail. And, though I understand why it needs to be part of this story; I do not like it.
There is something about that novel overall that is a real downer; but then again it is about dystopia. There is a glut of dystopian novels coming on the market right now, many very violent as del. I think that P B is a little ahead of the pack in some ways. He has the stomach, the diligence & the talent to re- package current trends, and current realities and present them to us in an imaginative, exciting and sometimes strangely beautiful way. He tricks us, so that we have to face an aspect of human nature as evidenced in current events. If we let the supporting structure of security and affluence erode through decisions we make , even our own civilized way of live can give way to a brutal, hellish, barbaric scrabbling for survival.
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- Damaris
- 11-21-13
Terribly realistic!
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes definitely. Its gripping and troubling and definitely worth the read. This is not a light read as it deals with gruesome topics: child soldiers, war and all its horrors but it is touching and well written.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
This is one of those tear jerkers and despite it all, it leaves you with hope.
Any additional comments?
Dystopian yes but very adult, well written and the characters are so very real!
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- Yolanda S. Bean
- 11-14-13
Another Novel in the world of Ship Breaker
Though this is listed as a sequel to Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, it feels more like a connected standalone novel than a true sequel. In fact, the only character to carry over is the augmented human, animal hybrid, Tool. The titular Drowned Cities are also a different setting in Bacigalupi’s post-apocalyptic water-logged world. The audio version is narrated by the same performer and he does a wonderful job of reeling the listener in to Mahlia’s story. Tool plays a more prominent role here, but the bulk of the story is Mahlia’s. It’s an engrossing book and its climax is quite riveting! The ending definitely leaves you wanting more! I hope that these characters all - not just Tool - appear in the planned third book in the series!
This YA novel, like its predecessor, crosses the line into preachy at times (though this may be more apparent in the audio format). But this does nothing to dampen the exciting plot. This sequel, too, is much darker than Ship Breaker, but this adds to the book’s overall emotional investment. It’s an enjoyable listen (read) - but its rather cliffhanger ending definitely leaves me anxious for more to the story! I hope that the wait isn’t overly long!
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- Dave
- 08-19-13
Nightmarish Apocalyptical Tale of Child Soldiers
In Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities, the American Dream has shifted into an apocalyptic nightmare, and its legacy is a devastating cycle of violence ripping the country into warring factions. The surviving casualties are quickly drafted into the oppressing armies to perpetuate the cycle of violence. Armies made of children.
The Drowned Cities is a story about child soldiers, the seduction of violence, and survival and it’s the most brutal, unrelenting story I’ve read or listened to in a while time. Like Bacigalupi’s other books, it’s drenched with social commentary that manages not to get in the way of the story or come off as preachy. Instead, we see the effects of rhetoric as we’re thrust through a violent, possible future.
I made a conscious decision to listen to this book without listening to Ship Breaker, which shares the same world with this story (though not any characters), and it held up just fine on its own. If anything, it made me very anxious to go listen to Ship Breaker.
We follow several children – a girl named Mahlia who lost one of her arms to a group of soliders and is apprenticed to the town doctor; Mouse – a boy, who knows the swamps and terrain; Ocho – a wounded soldier boy; and a genetically engineered monster named Tool. Mahlia and Mouse discover Tool dying in a swamp after an escape from one of the armies, and do their best to nurse him back to health. Mahlia hopes that Tool might be their ticket out of the war-torn environment of the Drowned Cities. Unfortunately, the half-man’s been a tool of war mongers his whole life, and is violently opposed to being chained again.
At one point, Mouse and Mahlia get split up, and it’s interesting to see how both of them have to accept violence to survive. They both become child soldiers, in a fashion. Something Bacigalupi did incredibly well was give the murderous squad of soldier boys a sense of humanity. It’d be easy to play them as wicked, child-like monsters absent of concsciences, but Bacigalupi captures their lost humanity in painful way, showing us they’re victims as much as anyone else, and I was surprised by how much I ended up caring about their fates, despite all the horrible atrocities they’d helped commit.
This is my first experience with Joshua Swanson as a narrator, and he was more than up to the task. It’s not a flashy narration, and Swanson is smart enough to realize it doesn’t need to be for it to be as compelling as it is.
All in all, The Drowned Cities is a violent, gut-wrenching listen, about how violence and rhetoric effect children. It is not for the faint of heart, but it’s an absorbing listen, and highly recommended.
(Originally posted at the AudioBookaneers)
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- victoria
- 03-14-13
Addicted to Bacigalupi
What I love about the author is that he spends little or no time on exposition. Bacigalupi doesn't spoon feed the reader. Drowned Cities may be a cautionary tale about a future world, where our failure to recognize climate change has led to a drowned and broken America. But that's for the reader to work out. Rather it's a horrifying story about a young girl surviving in a bleak and violent state of anarchy. With Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi took me deep into his nightmare world. And I for one will follow the author where ever he takes me.
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- AG.Kai
- 01-12-14
Surprisingly Good!
Well written story, surprisingly deep in character development for a fantasy war story and expertly narrated. What a hidden jem of an audio book!
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- Bart
- 11-20-13
Different and Suspencful
This was a bit different from the way these books flow and the main character wavers between good and bad moral choices constantly but keeps you wanting to listen. The book touches on many different types of issues ranging from moral to political and has a pretty big underdog negative feel to it. You keep rooting for the main characters but bad things just keep on happening to them. It does not make it a bad book but it will bore those that like nothing but action and a certain amount of required architecture to these types of books. If you like end of the world (or at least society as we know it) books and have no problems with explicit violence and cruelty this book is pretty good, but if you are squeamish I would stay away from it.
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