If you just want a well written story with a badass woman lead, or if you haven't had enough of pandemics from our current ones, do the same. It is the first novel in The Road to Nowhere Trilogy. This novel is the winner of the Philip K Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction. If the post-apocalyptic genre is your jam then stop what you are doing and head to your local bookstore and pick up a copy right now. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is post-apocalyptic feminist novel written by American author Meg Elison, published in 2014 by Sybaritic Press. And while this first book is not overtly queer, the subsequent novels have blatently queer and trans representations in them. Meg Elison told a well paced and structured story with an unapologetically feminist message. This is another book I was hooked on from the outset and never wanted to put down. We also a ray of hope, the Midwife, through her travels, continues to try and rescue women and children from slavery, sexual violence, and death showing us that even in the darkest of times there are lights that still shine. But what you get here is not a story that revels in atrocities but a cautionary tale about what happens when an already disenfranchised group is reduced even further, especially when societal structures break down. This book is not for the faint oh heart, there are scenes of attempted rapes and assaults, along with many homicides and other horrors. Through her travels, she encounters many different types of people and ways of life, everyone trying to adapt to the new realities of post-pandemic life. This is the first installment of a trilogy of books connected by the writings of our unnamed midwife protag. She disguises herself as a man for safety and sets out o the road keeping journals along the way. Our protagonist is a woman who prior to their pandemic worked as an obstetric nurse in a hospital there before falling ill herself and waking up in the hospital sometime later, disoriented and alone.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison is a book that begins in San Francisco when an unknown disease sweeps across the world (oh dear) that decimates the populations of women and children by making childbirth even more deadly for both.

The unnamed midwife trilogy