Number 21- A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World- C A Fletcher

A couple of years back, I read Dead Water by CA Fletcher, found it appropriately creepy so I went out and bought this.  To be honest, I would have been tempted to pick this up on the strength of that title if I'd seen it before knowing anything about his writing. 

Apparently he also writes as Charlie Fletcher, so I have a few more books to seek out for my ever expanding TBR mountain.

This is every bit as good as the title promises.  

100 years after humanity has all but died out after something happened to make 99.999% of the population infertile, the last few settlements of humans are scattered far and wide.

There are a couple of families on the Scottish Isles.  When a smooth talking thief visits our narrator Griz's family on their island, it sets off a chain of events.  The stranger leaves early in the morning, taking Griz's dog Jess with him.  Griz sets off on a journey across a deserted Britain to get her back.

This is my second real contender for best book of the year so far. Griz makes for a remarkable narrator. I was thoroughly invested in the quest to retrieve poor Jess. I'm a cat person not a dog person, but this book made me feel for that dog as strongly as Griz did.

Fletcher's depiction of a landscape abandoned for decades and reclaimed by nature is stunning.  The pacing and characterisation are spot on.  I'd worked out one of the surprises near the end of the book at least 100 pages early, but there was at least one other that took me completely unawares.

I can't really say much else in case of spoilers.  This is a beautifully written book that pushed all the right buttons for me and I recommend it unreservedly.