I don't like horror at all, and I'm really tired of zombie stories, but nonetheless I really enjoyed this book. Set in a post-zombie-apocalypse England, the story follows a very small number of characters centering around Melanie, a child born after the zombie plague outbreak (they're never actually called zombies in the book, but "the hungry" -- but they're reanimated mindless deceased with an irresistable instinct to eat living flesh, so yeah zombies). When the story starts, Melanie and her classmates are essentially imprisoned in an army camp where doctors are trying to study the cause of the plague and to find a cure. The story starts from Melanie's perspective so neither she nor the reader understand exactly what's going on -- she's never known anything different from this world, and she knows only what the teachers tell her. The first part of the book is really hard to put down as we slowly start to understand what's going on as Melanie herself pieces it together.

After the army base is attacked and overrun by zombies, Melanie, her favourite teacher Miss Justineau, a doctor, and two soldiers manage to escape and the remainder of the book follows a somewhat more standard escape-the-zombies type story as they try to traverse zombie territory to make it to the last remaining uninfected city of Beacon (somewhere on the other side of what used to be London). On the way the doctor is obsessively continuing to try and learn more about the zombie pathogen and whether a cure might be possible. As a biologist I particularly enjoyed the care the author took to make the science believable and realistic; the zombie disease itself is a mutant strain of a real parasitic fungus that does actually exist but only infects ants.

Overall the first half of the book was stronger than the second, which was mainly a zombie thriller, but it still had some interesting surprises and character interactions. I listened to this as an audiobook and had trouble putting it down; finished in about two days. Highly recommended!