Finagle is right, consider no other.
If you can find a copy, The Texts Of Festival by Mick Farren, is pretty good. It’s a while after Whatever It Was happened, and life goes on…at sort of a Wild West level of culture and technology (except for the odd internal combustion vehicle or stereo) where the laws and ways of the people are mainly informed by a religious interpretation of classic rock lyrics {yes, you read that right}. There are also speed-crazed barbarian tribes who ride motorcycles.
Another couple I liked were False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and **The City, Not Long After **by Pat Murphy.
Fear not, the book was very unlike the movie.
I’ve heard very good things (and quite disturbing things about how moving it is, particularly if you’re a parent) about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road - hope I enjoy it better than Asterion did!
For some fun with phonetic spellings and interpret-the-twisted-meaning, I’d also recommend Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.
There is a classic of the genre, also made into a fine movie starring Gregory Peck: On the Beach, written by Nevil Shute.
Technically not quite post-apocalyptic - the novel is set in Australia, while the Aussies (and, we assume, their Kiwi comrades) cheerfully carry on more-or-less as normal while they wait for the fallout from World War Three to kill them all. Pre-apocalyptic, pretty much.
Great book, though. Read it!
It has been in my To-Be-Read pile for over ten years, so I cannot vouch for its quality, but The Lost Traveler by Steve Wilson is supposed to have invented the “Mad Max” sub-genre.
Hmmm…are you looking for good books or merely entertaining ones? I thought the Deathlands series by James Axler was an entertaining series. True is starts to get repetitive after the first half dozen books, but I still thought it was at least interesting.
Ok, it’s a slow apocalypse and the novel is set during it.
Fahrentheit 451 is post-apocalyptic fiction?
Yep, just like Brave New World. That “New” part in the middle tells you that there was an old one that got blown up.
And as much as I like Dies the Fire (which was mentioned before I got in the thread so I skipped over it) I think that it’s a little early to call a book published four years ago “classic”.
One of the five or six greatest books written in English in the last 50 years.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is not going to be #1 on any list of the greatest post-apocalyptic fiction, but it has been a major lasting influence on horror, speculative fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction, in both film and the written word. Stephen King lists it as an inspiration, it’s spawned three film adaptations so far that have all been pretty decent successes (even though The Omega Man was awful) and each sparked quite a bit of debate, and its influence is clear in most of what’s come after it. Matheson could’ve spent some more time ironing out a few details, but the book as a whole is a hell of a compelling read–and a must for any horror fan, at the very least.
Davy and A Canticle for Liebowitz, I must confess, both bored me. Sorry.
I’d second (third?) the earlier recommendations of War Day by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, about the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and On the Beach by Nevil Shute. The last two dozen pages are almost unbearably moving and sad. I’d also add The Last Ship by William Brinkley, about a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer which survives WWIII, as told by the captain as he struggles to keep his crew loyal, disciplined and focused on survival. Some farfetched twists and turns to the plot, but still a great contribution to the genre.
I am not going to forgive you guys for a long time. I had my annual gynecologist appointment this afternoon, and I know I’d probably be spending a lot of time waiting in a cold room with a paper napkin clutched around me, so I picked up Dies the Fire on the way out of the library.
World War Z is a great post-apocalyptic novel. It’s a smart book and it assumes you’re smart. It never once strays from its conceit of being a book for people after the plague, either, and it expects you to understand why it doesn’t fill in any gaps. It speaks to wider issues, too - the zombies are like hunger, poverty, disease. If you face them head on, understand them, and have a will to fight them, they’re nothing. When you ignore them, hope they go away, and pretend they’re not at your doorstep, they overwhelm you.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a great post-apocalyptic novel. It’s elegaic, beautiful, heartbreaking. It speaks to the big issues - why do we bother? Who are we? Especially as a young librarian who was at the time training to be a preservationist, it made me question very personally why it is we do what we do, and then it had the straight out balls not to give a comforting answer, or any answer at all.
Parable of the Sower is an intelligent examination of our world, suckier. If civilization really did fall nowadays, it would fall like this (barring a zombie plague, of course.) It’s sickening and real but yet hopeful and inspirational.
Dies the Fire is a turd on a stick. It’s like a bunch of drunken SCA people around a fire talking about how, you know, if all the lights went out, you know, we’d be the ones who could cope with it, man. And I’m saying this as somebody who spent some of the best years of her life in the SCA. It’s clunky, it has all the traits of the shitty writing people inexplicably accept in genre fiction like they don’t deserve any better, and when the bad SCA guy showed up I would have thrown it across the room only if I did I would have had nothing to read but that chart of your uterus that looks like a Georgia O’Keefe cow skull. So I had to keep going. I was there for two hours all told because at the last minute I asked if I could get that new vaccine, so I had to wait longer, and let me tell you, it was a hard decision - cervical cancer or this book?
I’m sorry if I offended whoever suggested it, but I feel I have to act on behalf of anybody else who might pick up this offensive thing at the library. (Certainly don’t pay money for it.) The book actively made me angry which is rare at this stage in my life. These days if I don’t like a book, I just set it down - I don’t feel compelled to finish it and it doesn’t affect my life in any way. This one just steamed me up under the collar because it’s so offensively stupid.
The Ashes series by William W. Johnstone is pretty good I think.
That line right there is one of the finest lines I’ve ever read in al my years on the dope. Bravo.
I grabbed Cormac McCarthy’s glowingly reviewed The Road having seen the Coen brothers vision of No Country For Old Men.
I haven’t read it yet but on flicking through it, it has lots of periods, a few question marks but I haven’t spotted any other punctuation marks, not even commas.
I just opened it again and spotted one on page 158.
Okay - you didn’t like it. 
But, to be fair a lot of people did - including me. The original idea is interesting and well worked through; agreed you either like Stirling’s style (and characters) or you don’t but I would suggest people give it a try. If you do like it, you are going to like it big time and - as it is an extend series (a trilogy already and a quadrology (?) underway) - you are going to have a lot to enjoy.
The earlier, complementary series by Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time, in which Nantucket is catapulted back to the Bronze Age (certainly apocalyptic for the residents!) is, to my mind, better than *Dies the Fire * but, again, if you don’t like Stirling’s style you’ll hate it as well.