Also of interest...in tales of apocalypse

The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller (Knopf, $25)

Move over, Cormac McCarthy, said Ron Hogan in The Dallas Morning News. Like McCarthy’s The Road, Peter Heller’s debut novel takes an imagined postapocalyptic future and makes it “the stuff of top-shelf literary fiction.” Heller “brings us deep inside” the claustrophobic world of a pilot named Hig, who survived a global flu pandemic and now lives in an abandoned hangar with his dog and a prickly weapons expert. Frequently, this “poetic” novel reads “like a 19th-century frontier narrative.”

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The Last Policeman

by Ben H. Winters (Quirk, $15)

“No detective has ever felt smaller in the face of his fate than Hank Palace,” said Dan Kois in Slate.com. The hero of Ben Winters’s “funny, deeply wise” novel is a hard-boiled civil-service type doggedly investigating an insurance man’s death in New Hampshire even though an approaching asteroid will certainly wipe out Earth in six months. Palace is a great character, whose “looming problem is the same one we’ve been ignoring all our lives—that one day, we shall die.”

Skylark

by Meagan Spooner (Carolrhoda, $18)

Meagan Spooner’s debut novel for young readers is “like one of those over-too-soon carnival rides,” said Rollie Welch in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Spooner delivers “amped-up thrills, annoying lulls, and a rousing finale” in this tale of 16-year-old Lark, who lives in the aftermath of a devastating war and must escape a system in which the magical energy of youth is harnessed to power the world of adults. Though Lark initially defers to boys, she eventually finds her strength.

The Kill Order

by James Dashner (Delacorte, $18)

“Take a deep breath before you read any James Dashner book,” said Sharon Haddock in the Salt Lake City Deseret News. The prequel to Dashner’s best-selling Maze Runner young-adult trilogy doesn’t give readers much chance to relax as it follows a quartet of survivors trying to make sense of life after solar flares and disease bring humanity to the brink of extinction. Like the books in Dashner’s trilogy, The Kill Order is a “fast-paced, nerve-wracking read.”