The Girl With All The Gifts

Our theme for the Convent Book Group this month is... Zombies! I'm not sure exactly how we arrived at this particular subject; it wasn't my idea. I must confess that I didn't finish the selected junior fiction title. Life is too short. And I wasn't really looking forward to reading M.R. Carey's The Girl With All The Gifts, especially when I saw how looooong it was.

But before long I was well and truly sucked in. MR (he's a he, that's all I know) is an experienced writer of comics and graphic novels, and he knows what he's doing. The Girl With All The Gifts is a taut, highly competent thriller set in a dystopian world where most of humanity has been wiped out by a fungal infection that turns people into mindless, flesh-eating 'hungries.' But Melanie is not like the other hungries; she is highly intelligent. Perhaps the future of the world lies in her hands...

The ending was not at all what I expected, in a good way. Apparently MR wrote the screenplay for a film at the same time as the novel. I might have to check out if it's on Netflix!